Track Mangoes

In it's attempt to portray the "real" India "Slumdog Millionaire" transferred the virgin/whore syndrome to the third world. You can either be a corrupted fat cat or a virtuous slumdog. For Director Danny Boyle India is the same ole rollicking third world it always has been. The colonial gaze hasn't changed much. You can look at India as something which must be conquered (which nobody will admit to), something which must be studied (exotic/scientific subject-object), or something which must be helped (missionary). Either way we as consumers in the wast cannot look to India as Indians, but only as westerners. The fact plauges us. We wish we could change it, but we can't. Some people try. Boyle is one of them. I won't touch on the fact that Boyle is ENGLISH, an irony I find funnier than Winston Churchill's drinking problem, but I will say that "Slumdog Millionaire" is just about as good as Boyle's other boxoffice hit: "28 Days Later." Sidenote: Zombies don't run, they meander at a droaning pace.

As for the (vapid) charachters, ask yourself which one you relate to the most. You probably don't relate to any of the evil doers, so that leaves, of all the substantial characters, lastnameless Latika, Jamal Malik, and Salim. Maybe you relate to Latika because she is taken advantage of, pushed into a situation from which she cannot pull herself. However, she, like Salim time and again, makes the moralistic mistake of turning her back on Jamal in his greatest time of need. We forgive her for it thugh, because in the end she provides the deus ex machina. But don't forget that Jamal's stubborn adoration of her was the only thing holding them together. (And what drove that? Perhaps the looming fact that she would put out for everyone but Jamal.) As said, Salim does the same. You can't relate to him though because he, unlike Latika, is the matyr figure, the reformer, and, if you're reading this, you're not a matyr, so Salim's off limits. Additonally, what would make him suddenly change his mind? His brother's unique circumstances? You would think life or death matters would have been unique enough for Salim to reform, but, unfortuneately they're not. Years of greed suddenly melt away. Finally, you can't relate to Jamal. Why? Two words: "LATIKA! LATIKAAA!" Are you really so one dimentional, Jamal Malik? No one can stay in love that long. And God help you if you can.

So that leaves the minor characters, the only ones of which that have any sort of depth/backstory are the Blinded Bard or the Cheif of Police and MAYBE Jamal's mother, though she is really a vicitim of historical circumstance (read: Hindu Muslim violence). So are you the Blind Kid or the Chief?

Personally, I relate to the cheif of police. He is presented with Jamal, a kid whom he has been told is a liar and theif, and yet he seems to be truthful and quite astute. The Cheif interrogates Jamal only to find that he cannot tell whether or not Jamal is telling the truth, or he is just retarded, or stubborn, or what? The cheif's plight is never resolved. We never know what action he takes agaisnt/for Jamal, we only see his confusion. It's not a moral confusion. It's not an existential confusion. It's simple confusion. "What am I going to do with this kid?" And that confusion is never resolved.

I felt that way watching "Slumdog Millionaire." Confused. "Why am I sitting here watching this 'realistic' depiction of India?" Yes, okay, India is the third world. Yes, okay, there was tension between Hindu's and Muslims. Yes, okay, there is a lot of corruption and organized crime due to a faulty system of Law. Does that mean that I should accept Boyle's depiction as the real thing?

And Why is HOW Jamal knows the answer to each question essential to the plot? The answer is that it's not. "Slumdog Millionaire" is not, contrary to what I've heard most people say, about Jamal winning a million dollars. The movie is a love story and HOW he wins a million dollars is irrelevant to the storyline between him and Latika, which really only develops towards the end of the movie. The constant back and forth in time is, rather, a marketing ploy. The story itself is boring, we've heard the quest for love thing before. So they juice it up with psuedo-documentary.
What bother's me about this movie is that it has little focus. The point of A Story is to recount the life changing expereince of a single induvidual. "Slumdog Millionaire" Attmepts that, but, because it is a Bad Story about one quest to get his girl, the plot needed to be juiced up with sociological voyeruism.

When people leave the theater after seeing this movie they SHOULD say, "ooo that was a great story, damn, he Really loved Latika!" but more often than not, and especially for those people who have never been to India, people end up saying, "Oh my Gosh, I feel like I know the country so much better now. And when Jamal jumped in the poop, oooooo, and Did you see how they blinded that kid. THAT REALLY HAPPENS? DID YOU THAT? IKNEWTHATBECAUSEIREADITINABOOKABOUTINDIA!" And then the well meaning consumers of high brow media get in their Honda's and drive home.

"Slumdog Millionaire" is a joke. It's not a movie. A movie has a plot. It's not a documentary. A documentary is slice of truth removed from context. A documentary avows no claim to reality as it avows no claim to fiction. Documentary is a genre unto its own. Rather than being a story or a documentary "Slumdog Millionaire" is a fictional portrayal of a real place, time, and culture. Ergo it's Propaganda.

Instead of worrying about what is or what isn't the Real India we should maintain a respectful distance or, like Mother Tersea, get our hands dirty. And since not many of us are willing to be so Saintly I suggest we stick to exotifying our own culture. Maybe Boyle should stick to Zombie movies. Hmm... Though I'm also sensing a sequel, something even scarrier than a Zombie flick. I'll call it "28 Days of Colonial Bullshit."

During WWII the Third Reich issued identification cards to all the citizens living in Germany and the provinces that Germany ruled outside the Berlin jurisdiction. Among other things, as I'm sure you can guess, the card took special note if you were Jewish, a Gypsy, a homosexual, mentally challenged, and the list goes on.

Today in Queer Activists and Feminists are re-instigating this Fascist tradition of identification. Under the guise of "building awareness," that term that the Left uses as a stand in for "the proliferation of propaganda," Lefties in San Fran and New York have been issuing "Safer Sex Licenses." You can read all about them here: http://www.stfree.com/.

The company, STFree Certifications, was founded in 2003 by Eli Dancy. According to the site "At the age of 22, Dancy decided to do something about the irresponsibility concerning unsafe sex practices in the society he lived in." In other words: he got an STD, felt bitter about it, and decided to get revenge by creating a company that would demonize STD's because he hates himself. The bio goes on to claim "past attempts from outsiders to do STD/AIDS prevention in neighborhoods such as his had failed. He felt the failure of current prevention methods was strongly due to the lack of knowledge decision makers had on the true issues that really go on in affected communities." In other words: STARS and Judeo-Christian abstienence only education programs, or government funded hoo-haw, came into the schools, and, like they always do, failed to teach anyone a lick about safer sex practice. STFree is supposedly "experienced by socially responsible individuals across the globe." Of course you can only be "socially responsible" if your a bitter-queer from New York that needs to push his agenda on the rest of the well meaning horny people of New York City.

Notice how Mr. Dancy, rather than taking it upon himself to ameliorate the educational system decided to found a company whose only capacity is for alienation. How can this card possibly be good for sexual freedom?

This card, to me, is, yet another, perfect example of how 80's and 90's feminism has failed sexual liberation and how its residue is haunting our country. In the 50's college administrations would lock women in their dorms at night. Witht he sexual revolution of the 60's women began to say "hey let us out, we know it's risky, but we would rather take the risk than rot here." The women of the sixties understood the potential danger of sex just as gay men have understood this danger. These women were fully aware that they could get brutally raped if they opened themselves up to casual sex, just as gay men who were having late night rendez vous's in central park understood that their "random hookup" could have been Jeffery Dahmer.

The women and gay men of the 60's were brave, but they were also stupid. They didn't realize the health risks involved in casual sex. 80's and 90's feminism, which told women that they could wear what they wanted, say what they wanted, and do what they wanted without having to worry about the dangers of casual sex, ruined the common sense that fueled the sexual revolution of the 60's. Granted it was also that common sense that lead to so many STD infections among women, and the AIDS epidemic among gay men. You can't have casual sex without the risk. That's how it works. The left, however, always propigating its double standard of responsiblity and lechery wants to find a way to make a middle ground between healthy living and ravid sex. There is none.

I'm not saying people shouldn't have rabid, anonymous sex. Hell, I LOVE Rabid anonymous sex. Who doesn't? But I, unlike feminists and Queer Activists, understand the dangers involved in it and I don't need or want a company like STFree to make a feeble attempt at trying to make my depraved lifestyle seem somehow wholesome and responsible. IT'S NOT...THAT'S WHY I USED THE WORD DEPRAVED.

Dancy introduced the "Safe Sex License" in New York City in Dec. 2004. Now, going on 3 years later and over 15,000 members strong, STFree introduced its’ online registration for HIV/AIDS testing. The epidemic is becoming global.

The card itself isn't even that useful. It, of course, cannot guarantee that the cardholder does not have an STD. Just as a drivers’ license won’t give you information about the cardholder's particular level of responsibility (DUI's, parking tickets, accidents, etc.), the same idea holds true for a STFree cardholder. The card does, however, contain information about your HIV status. All memebers must then take a "pledge" to not engage in irresponsible practices which could increase their risk for contracting an STD. But something tells me this pledge might be pretty useless.

Furthermore this card system is still falling prey to the anti-progressive sexual rhetoric. Anyone under the age of 18 cannot obtain a card, as if to say that if you are younger than that you can't get HIV because, of course, 18 year olds aren't having casual sex. In my expereince, at the seasoned age of 20, it is predominately 18 year olds who are having casual sex. Again, the bourgois idea of age and sex has taken over this supposedly progressive system.

Luckily there is no central database which people can look up your sexual health status. But with the online version of this card in construction I wonder how long that will last. Could it be that we could have a section on Facebook for your sexual health corroborated and validated by the STFree company?

Finally, the site asks "Why would anyone with the right intentions refuse to share their status with a potential partner?" Let me try to tackle that one, STFree. It's because of companies like STFree that STD's are so demonized in the first place. If there was no stigma about having HIV in the first place, as full well there shouldn't be, then people would free disclose their sexual health status. But the Left has been dishonest, as has the Right. STD's need to be treated like any other disease: treatable and not the end of the world. Having gonorreha, to most people, might be the end of their sexual lives when it full well doesn't have to be.

We can force people to be honest about many things. Sex is just not one of them.

the whole debacle makes me think of that scene in "The Pianist," where Adrien Brody is walking down the stairwell in the apartment complex where he is hiding and a woman sticks her head out of the door, her head covered in blond Aryan curls, and she says, obviously suspicious of his dark hair and large nose, "I demand to see your identification card!" Brody runs away and she screams at the top of her lungs, "JEW! JEW! JEW!"

If you want to have casual sex you've got to buck up and be prepared to die for your right to have it.

When I came out at age twelve my sexual-preference didn’t feel like a choice. Biology seemed to confine me in pubescent shackles and all I wanted was any male that would (sexually) give me the time of day. I wouldn't have called myself promiscuous ("but who knows?!") and finding a sexual partner proved tricky in the dominantly Christian suburb where I lived. Luckily, at thirteen, my family moved to inner city Portland where I could surround myself with gay culture.

After a two year binge on gayness [where I was constantly surrounded by like minded people (read: the well meaning progressives) who taught me that--above all else--I was a normal teenager,] I realized that, ironically, it has been conservatives (Christians, Mormons, Jews and the blue collared, like the loggers on my mother's side of the family) who have always upheld the unique role homosexuals play in society. The liberal idea of homosexual equality, to me, is far more bigoted and backward than anything I've ever heard from an "ignorant" "anti-gay" conservative.

Gay men are cultural refugees who have power and wealth in things that have no price. Their legacy and contributions to society can be traced from late 19th century photography back to the dreamy statues of the Greeks, the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, through Romanticism, the Pre-Raphaelites, and up into the photographs of Robert Mapplethorpe. They are, it seems, responsible, in effect, for western aesthetics. (That's right, I said it, FUCK Georgia O'Keefe.)That makes gay men powerful sentinels of aesthetic culture.

Are Gay Men hyper-sensitive to art? Could it be in born? Like a kind of autism, could sensory stimuli overwhelms the gay-male brain? How do we explain, in a rural family, why there will sometimes be a boy who Sticks Out, a boy who is uninterested in paternal pursuits, like throwin-the-ole-pigskin-around? Instead of Tonka Trucks and building blocks he is hypnotized, overwhelmed, by the lushness of his mother’s clothes, the silks and the linens, the seductive scent of her perfumes, sandalwood, vanillas, orange blossoms and rose buds, and struck by the vibrancy of her make up, the deepness of the mascara, the pastel shadows, and the violent beauty of a streak of lipstick across a palid face. Makeup, to him, is simply a paintbrush. How do we explain this behavior in children? It's an international and timeless phenomenon.

Of course claiming that gay men are born hyper-sensitive to art makes me sound like I'm saying all gay men are pansies. It's like saying black people are born hyper-sensitive to (INSERT STEREOTYPE HERE TO AVOID THE RACE POLICE). But maybe something about their biology does, perhaps, predispose them to take a liking to art? There. Now it's less acerbicly worded.

I've worked with children in my church and in summer camps. I’ve noticed that this nascent fascination with aesthetics, for boys, often couples with a predisposition towards sensitivity and/or shyness. This predisposition leads, inevitably, towards a failure to bond with peers, particularly the ones uninterested by paper and string. This disjunction causes a feeling of Otherness which is tantamount to the gay experience. It's a uniquely gay Otherness unlike racial exile. I want to, almost, call it "queerness."When gay adults claim that he or she has been gay since childhood what they are remembering is, in effect, this particular kind of Otherness, this queerness, rather than the actual sexual attraction.

Because of this it seems odd to me that gay activists would align themselves so stringently with biology. The widespread desire to find a biological basis for homosexuality is still moot (I doubt we will ever find a substantial biological foundation for gayness) and, furthermore, will lead to claims that gay people are deformed at the prenatal level. The desire itself is symptomatic of an over-politicized social climate. The left actually believes that finding the “Gay Gene” will force everyone to submit to the rhetoric of “acceptance.” Quelle fascisme!

The LGBT community needs to stop harassing Christian people. Gay people should also get over Christian hangup on male gayness. The tradition sees homosexuality as an existential threat because it is an existential threat if you follow the rules in the bible! And besides, if Gayness is the antithesis of Puritanism (which, go with me, I think it is) gay men owe a lot to the church for how it has influenced gay culture: decadent, colorful, and lubed up like KFC chicken. (Then, when I think of the alter boys in Catholic churches, the contra altos in the choir of Europe, and the statues of young'ins lashed, crucified, bleeding, naked, I can't help but think that the church also owes something to gay culture...).

The Gays found their crack-pot prophet and he was nastier and crazier and ten times more insane than Coulter and Limbaugh. Yes, his name was Chris Crocker. Crocker was the crazed messiash from the woods, who spent all his life silently collecting Britney paraphanellia until finally the Lord called him forth to speak, to SHOUT from the highest mountain the internet had to offer, and he did. Chris Crocker told everyone to leave Britney Alone and the scary thing that nobody wants to admit is that they did. He broke the silence long enough to shout the truth and tell America something it didn't want to hear: it needed Britney.

But I digress.

Wihtout crazy people like Chris Crocker gay culture will fall into genteel dandyism, no longer the radical social experiment it once was. A truly progressive gay culture should not be a middle-class, elitist posturing with a paternalistic attitude toward the religious working class’ “ignorance.” I hate it when people insist that "We are the educated ones, and your homophobia comes out of deep ignorance."

Gay Culture has historically been the only true believer in the fact that sexuality is highly fluid. They've constructed their entire culture around the outer limits of sexual spectrums, fetishisms, fantasy, taboo and permiscuosness.

It occurred to me early on in adolescence that the feeling, the fright and excitement, the visceral fury of the simple idea of having sex with a woman, was something I had not experienced since, say, I was thirteen and trying to have sex with men. I grew nostalgic for that sensation of the badness of outer sexuality and I had grown weary of men. Gender didn't seem to matter so much anymore, the excitement of something new and "forbidden" was overwhelmingly appetizing. I had also constructed an entire identity that was GAY and unchanging, so to have sex with a woman would be like I was straight and having sex with men. Was I an in the closet straight man? However, like a sixteen year old, I was terrified to peruse anything even though I wanted many things quite badly. WHAT IF I WAS WRONG? Better to just stay in the closet. Keep having sex with men.

If sexuality can be this fluid how are we, then, to concede that gayness is strictly biological? To deny fluidity of sexual preference is to abandon the work academics have put into the study of gender and sexuality. Sex is temporal and always on a continuum, coming in and leaving like the tides. It permeates every relationship, even familial, every dream, every word that comes out of our mouths is in someway touched by sex. How can we find a GENE for this? How can there possibly be one biological factor, nay, one UNWAVERING biological factor that determines our sexuality from birth until death?

We can change our sexuality. Yes. You heard it: sexual conversions are theoretically possible. Though they may not be pleasant or desirable or even valuable, and though Christian fanatics may use this fact against queers, sexual conversion must be, at least theoretically, possible. We are, in effect, more comfortable knowing that sexuality is genetic, rather than letting it loose to the chaotic powers of God.

Instead of mooing about equality the Left should look long and hard at its approach to gay politics. At the same time, we, as they sexually lost, should seriously reconsider our affiliation with the left. While the staunchly gay should question its die-heard pursuit of marriage rights and special legal protection. If that's really what we want then we should at least stop to discuss how gay culture will be affected and if we want that or not. Additionally, gay men ought to embrace their culture’s character in spite of its tendency towards sexual promiscuity and drug use. I say appreciate it BECAUSE of its sexual promiscuity and drug use! To be gay is to be an outsider. To be an outsider is to be an artist. To be an artist is to be hated by society at large most of the time. Join the club.

Even if you think homosexuality is an inborn trait it does no good to seek the approval of government, the Judeo-Christian establishment, and other contenders who know very little about queerness. I'm adopting the view of Parker who once said, "heterosexuality isn't normal, it's just common." We've got to start thinking and behaving along those lines instead of validating the Right's queer-fears and degrading our culture by asking for their approval. I'm not calling for separatism, (though a continent of gay men wouldn't be half bad) but I am calling for enlightened militancy. We’ve got much bigger fish to fry than marriage.

Since homosexuality is a choice, there is no need to harbor self-hatred by thinking that our choice to love who we want to love is somehow wrong. It’s fabulous and truthful and totally against all the rules. Love is radical. And it’s how culture survives in the face of obliteration.

I was consuming my monthly shot of "Details," when I cam across this frightening article, frightening because, to me, it is proof that the American Gay (not to be confused with American Queer) is circling the cultural drain.

The article outlined the ways in which "A-Gays," the new urban blend of executive chic and straight-man savvy, didn't seem to critique the old American Gay culture so much as it targeted a very specific "kind" of gay man. In doing so, the article maligns that kind of gay man with the all gay men. The author touts that "A-Gays" are "smarter, sexier, and far more successful" than these Other gays. They're "moneyed...educated," and they certainly don't speak with "a lisp." It seems to me, then, by this criteria, that "B-Gays" must be all of the following: stupid, ugly, unsuccessful, POOR, and swishy (complete with lisp). Oh, not to mention guilt ridden: "Comfortable in their own skin, they're fast becoming the new archetype of cosmopolitan masculinity," writes Mike Albo, as if to suggest that the rest of us have been suffering from Vastly Incorrect guilt such that we wouldn't want to sell out to mainstream culture and, my god, Who Wouldn't Want To Do That?

"[A-Gays] don't own yappy miniature dogs or time-shares in Fort Lauderdale," Albo continues. "Their Savile Row suits are impeccable (A-gays tend to go custom rather than buying off the rack), and they furnish their homes with collectible pieces by designers like Claude Lalanne. They drive to Krav Maga class in Lexus hybrids and read four newspapers a day, including the Wall Street Journal, because they're bosses and entrepreneurs, not employees."

Albo walks on the edge of knife, on one side he is innocently (?) describing a newfound archetype of the American Gay, on the other side he suggests that, perhaps, We Should All Follow Suit. Albo seems to feel abandoned by his bretheren, such that he finds it necessary to paint us déclassé. What. Elitist. Bullshit. It evidences, to me, a shift in the American Gay mindset.

Since Stonewall, the gay movement has sought equality under the law, often shunting the societal taste for homosexuality at large. Gay men were cultural refugees, physically debilitated from AIDS, possessed with a great knack for the plastic and performing arts, and absolutely attuned to Other Gay Men. Today the trend is to seek societal approval. Gay Rehab for homophobes, brought on by the pesky feminist movement, infiltrated schools spouting liberal dogma into the ears of people who wouldn't/couldn't hear it. Makeshift "awareness" building programs like "Day of Silence" were propagated in schools to show that WE WERE OUT THERE! Strangely, Day of Silence was most popular among straight people. And, AH!, what a perfect metaphor for what is happening to gay men.

Gay men are becoming straight. Straight in a cultural sense. They are no longer concerned, primarily, with equality under the law, because they know it is only a matter of time before it happens. Now gay men seek conformity and allegiance from their peers. Feminists have filled their heads with the allusive idea of Eutopic equality, a grand promise of freedom, and we have moved away from the more realistic goal of political equality. Cultural arch comes from outsider status. Some people want to give that up. Somewhere along the line we started defining ourselves with straight terms. Money. Success. Fame. Tools in the capital market replaced the paintbrush and the magnifying glass.

In the acclaimed show, "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy," which only ran for a few years, offered a domestically challenged heterosexual male the opportunity to live a day like a fag. He was then invited to keep the tools bequeathed unto him by the "experts" of gay culture. Paradoxically, by adopting a homosexual aesthetic the subject would supposedly buffer his heterosexuality. It's this kind of sick and disgusting contradiction that makes me find mainstream gay culture so utterly repulsive. WHEN DID WE BECOME STRAIGHT PEOPLE'S SHOESHINNERS?! WHENWHENWHEN? The show offers, at once, a "narrative of transformation," as suggested by Katherine Sender, and a kind of sexual exotification.

One could find it perfectly reasonable for a straight man to sit down, watch an episode, and come out either disgusted (hey, at least he tried, right?) or enlightened, if only a little. But the problematic aspect of this show, to me, occurs when a Gay man watches this program, when a Gay man sees the narrative of subservience, this narrative of refined cultural transformation, and feels that it is his duty to perpetuate the sexual violence. The transformation narrative lets the straight man know that Anyone Can Do It, while it informs the gay man that he has no culture of his own, that his culture is a thing for the bourgoisie to play with, that his culture's soul purpose is to decide what color the Duchess's throw pillows are going to be.

I think this desire in gay men might stem to the the gay fetish of being penetrated by straight men. We must get rid of this. That fantasy, the way I see it, is a direct connect to the internalized self-hatred so prominent amongst gay men. Oh if only a straight man would want me! is essentially the same as If Only I Could Get a White Bitch.

Okay okay Jens is calling for separatism again. SO BE IT.

It is also no accidence that gay aesthetic is becoming more white, relatively affluent, or both. People who have had the luxery of "coming out" have been doing so since the fifties and now, with the largest gay constituency being rich-white-men they are becoming a political and socio-economic force that has a real hand in the tides of retail markets and senate floors. Back in the day gay wasn't such a culture, but now it's becoming predictably white. Latino gay culture and black gay culture has severed from the dominant gay culture, and probably rightfully so. Dominant gay culture is suffocatingly centered aroudn the slave-master relationship with straight people.

I ask myself if I really want an "A-Gay" lobbying for me. What does it mean for the future of the culture of which I am so fond?

Perhaps what Ablo is most correct about, unfortunately, is his contention that "[A-Gays] will never say 'Just wear it with a belt!' They own the company that manufactures the belts." Ah! So it comes out. The A-Gay is no longer part of that group of cultural refugees with a hyper-sensitivity to art. The A-Gay is not gay at all, he is capital machine who sleeps with men. "B-Gays" let their sexuality flourish with pagan delight in the face of heteronormative constraints, while the A-Gay is above that, he keeps his sexuality under a business suit. That is until his cock slips out and we see the true content of his character. Sexual Chthonianism.

Return to the fold!!!