by Guy Branum
We have to sound all faggy like this so we can find each other. Gays are a small, diffuse, physically invisible minority. This is deeply isolating. We spend most of our lives in your world, where only 70 to 80 percent of our actual life is executable. It takes other gay people for us to have sex, but also other, less basic operations of identity. Sharing experiences, building relationships, and fighting for equality. We have to locate mates; otherwise, how are we going to make more gay people?
At nearly anywhere in the world that isn’t a gay bar, we must assume the people around us are straight. If we make a mistake about that, we could get killed. In forty-eight states, you are allowed to say you murdered a man because he was gay and hit on you, and that can be considered an affirmative defense that reduces your crime from murder, which can carry a sentence of twenty-plus years, to voluntary manslaughter, which can involve as short a sentence as three years. Identifying other gay people is a delicate science. Staring at dudes like they’re a piece of meat is useful, but it can’t do all the work.
One time I was doing comedy on a cruise ship at a comedy festival run by the podcast network I work with. The festival-goers constituted about 10 percent of the ship’s guests. The rest of the ship was occupied by nice families, grandparents and grandkids, family reunion parties. One afternoon I was walking past the pool and I heard fun. I heard a male voice that didn’t feel a need to sound particularly male. I walked up and introduced myself, and the moment he heard my voice, he knew why.
That’s what our voices do. That’s what Mitt Romney’s classmate’s bangs did. It’s what gay men’s tank tops and capri pants and jumpsuits do. It’s what my friend Karen assures me gay women’s nose rings and flouncy, athletic ponytails do. They provide a device for us to locate each other, but it is significant that these location devices be plausibly deniable. Now we live in a world where gay men get pride flags or the word “fag” tattooed on themselves, but for most of the history of gay men, and for most of the lives of gay men living today, such unambiguous symbols would have been deeply dangerous. We are prey, and bright plumage can get you killed.
So gay male culture demands that we be able to blend into the wallpaper when we need to, but also that we be capable of making ourselves very known in other situations. We deeply fear being seen and heard in the wrong way. This means two things:
1. We fear our own voices, and
2. We fear other gay men’s voices even more.
I think you get now that while I literally mean the tone and timbre of the sounds that come out of our mouths, I also mean the uncamouflaged content of those voices. Our real stories and lives.
What I’m saying is that E. M. Forster could publish A Room with a View about a butt-hungry young Brit looking for romantic satisfaction in the Mediterranean during his lifetime because that Brit was a woman. Any gayness in his story was hidden. Maurice, the novel he wrote about an explicitly gay romance, wasn’t published until after his death. What would people think if they knew?
For centuries, we’ve masked our stories to look like yours, terrified of what you’d think of us if you knew our real truth, our real butt-sex-in-the-bushes-having truth, so we remained silent, or we tried to echo your words.
Of course, the only thing worse than having to be embarrassed about your own truth is having to be embarrassed about someone else’s version of your life. When I was on that playground, being faggy, there were other, better-hidden gay kids. They had to have feared me, because being associated with me would have made them less capable of hiding and protecting themselves. I know this because I felt that way myself for so long. You know in Call Me by Your Name when the old, unsexy faggy couple come to dinner and Elio needs to insult them? That’s why: because he’s terrified of what their version of gayness means about him.
In a 2004 review of The L Word, queer author Stacey D’Erasmo wrote one of the smartest analyses of gay representation I’ve ever read:
[W]atching the series left me with a strange sense of dislocation along with my happiness. A peculiar consequence of so rarely seeing your kind on television, in movies, in plays, what have you, is that you can become, almost unwittingly, attached to a certain kind of wildness: the wildness of feeling not only unrepresented but somehow unrepresentable in ordinary terms. You get so good at ranging around unseen (and finding less obvious characters to identify with, from Tony Soprano to Seven of Nine) that it can feel a little limiting to be decanted into a group of perfectly nice women leading pleasant, more or less realistic lives. You can think, ungratefully: Is that all there is?
Another consequence of living in a representational desert is that a tremendous urgency develops, a ferocious desire not only to be seen in some literal sense—we do have a lesbian character, she’s that one in the back in the pantsuit; did you miss that episode?—but to be seen with all the blood and angst and magic you possess. Watching “Angels in America’’ on HBO last month, I was reminded of what Georgia O’Keeffe once said, that she decided to make flowers huge enough that people couldn’t ignore them.
You fear a voice you cannot control representing your life and your world, but because so much is unsaid, you also hunger for it to be said with grandeur, with plumage.
Gay men don’t like art about being gay. We want it, definitely, but when we’re presented with it, it is unsettling. I’m a gay male stand-up comic; I want to tell jokes about being gay to audiences of gay men, at least sometimes. They are uneasy with this arrangement. How can my jokes be about them: I am fat and not hot. Why am I talking and not them? A range of issues around honest representation through art that straight people are used to negotiating, we must litigate for the first times in our brains. In the end, isn’t it just easier to go laugh and love with Amy Schumer or Nikki Glaser?
In the foreword to The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde wrote, “The nineteenth century dislike of Realism is the rage of Caliban seeing his own face in a glass. The nineteenth century dislike of Romanticism is the rage of Caliban not seeing his own face in a glass.” Who would have thought I would come to a point in this book where I argued that gay men are scared of mirrors? That’s the thing, though: So many gay men love literal mirrors, because in a mirror (or Instagram account), you are simply an image that can be groomed to indistinguishability from straightness. Metaphorical mirrors, which reflect the fullness of our lives, will always remind us that we are different.
I was terrified of every gay narrative and person I was presented with until I turned seventeen. They were creepy, they were wrong. By the age of twelve, I knew that men were what made my dick move, but that didn’t mean I was gay. Gay men wear silly shirts and make silly noises. I was something else. I could not deny my sexual attraction, but my commitment to not being merged into gay narrative was so great that I denied the basic truth of how that attraction should be labeled.
Then PBS got involved.
In 1993, Britain’s Channel 4 acquired the rights to Tales of the City, Armistead Maupin’s playful melodrama about life in San Francisco for young single people in the 1970s. Though the story centered on a naive straight girl from Ohio, the world she lived in, like Maupin himself, was exceedingly gay. The series aired in the U.S. on PBS, leading to official condemnations from the Georgia, South Carolina, and Oklahoma legislatures. They were horrified that tax dollars had gone to make a series presenting homosexuality as simply a charming way of life. They feared it might make nice God-fearing children gay. They were right.
Full of fear and fascination, I watched Tales of the City in my childhood bedroom. It was wrapped in the narrative of a woman, Mary Ann Singleton, played by the wholesome and relatable Laura Linney. It was fun and funny and sexy and bawdy. And the sexy part mattered. Every representation of gayness I’d seen until that time was either sanitized of sex, or suffused with coercion or predation. In Tales of the City, Michael Tolliver, Mary Ann’s gay bestie, goes to the EndUp (a real gay bar in San Francisco), gets hit on, then enters an underwear competition despite embarra
ssment and uncertainty. It was hot, it was real, and it made me, on some level, wish I could go there. Eventually, I did.
This is why I hate my voice and the voices of other gay men. Heterosexual society wants to keep us weak, apart, and uneducated, so it strips us of the tools we need to find each other and learn from each other. I didn’t come out of the closet at seventeen. I didn’t even admit to myself that I was gay. I heard a real gay voice, though, Armistead Maupin’s, that was skilled enough and brave enough to show me a real life, a whole life that could be mine. And, of course, one with enough murder, mysteries, and drugs to seem appealing to a young closeted person.
And that’s why I love my voice and the voices of other gay men. They are full of beauty, culture, cooperation, music, opinions about Alfre Woodard, and sex. Paul Rudnick’s Jeffrey, R. Zamora Linmark’s Rolling the R’s, Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, Tarell Alvin McCraney’s Moonlight, and all the way back to Forster’s Maurice. These aren’t just works from an underrepresented community, they’re people who were trained to hide and be silent but were resolute enough to make noise despite the danger. They didn’t know me, but they did it for me.
* * *
1. The Commissioner of Major League Sodomy.
2. This is also a hilarious Anne Frank joke.
3. Let’s define the specific texture of this gay voice of which I speak. It is characterized by a careful pronunciation, a rapid variation in pitch, elements of upspeak, possible nasality, and s’s so sibilant they might be described as a lisp. Such modes of speech are now hardly exclusive to gay men, as anyone who’s heard David Beckham speak can attest. Vocabulary, emphasizing florid adjectives, and strong opinions are also factors, as is subject matter, which can incorporate areas traditionally reserved for women. However, like Justice Stewart with his pornography, mostly you just know it when you hear it.
THE MAN WHO WATCHED THE MAN WHO SHOT LIBERTY VALANCE
MY MOTHER LOVES MANY things in her life, and one of them is me. She loves Douglas Sirk movies, responsible guard dogs, babies, very cold Coca-Colas, and the collected works of Tom Petty. And she loves me.
My father loved very few things in his life, and I was never certain I was one of them.
My mom’s loves were always very apparent because she was always sharing them with me. My life, at its most basic, may just be me learning to love things from my mom, then going out and exploring those loves. I realize this is a very Freudian construction of a gay man’s life, but facts is facts. On summer nights, she’d turn on the TV and explain to me that something special was going to happen. Then something special would happen, usually a showing of Arsenic and Old Lace or Bell Book and Candle on a UHF station.1 Sometimes it was conversations about how Fuerte avocados could never be as good as Hass, or why I owed it to myself to love the Indigo Girls. The result was the same: showing me that the world was a fun place full of game shows and tapioca pudding.
My dad did none of those things. He worked and he slept and he ate. He hunted and he watched football, but I knew him well enough to know he did not love those things. He wanted to love those things, but he didn’t. He loved work and some of our dogs, but not all of them. There was no human culture for which he expressed true appreciation other than a well-finished concrete slab. However, if you asked him what his favorite movie was, he would always say The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.
If you ask my mom what her favorite movie is, she will not give you an answer. She loves movies. She loves The Graduate for its perverse humor, and October Sky for its simple (I do not use that word as a compliment) American (nor that) morality; she even, oddly, loved The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers.
Let’s take a moment to discuss this. In 2002, my mother was fifty-one years old. She had never expressed any real interest in fantasy, though it had been my greatest passion for much of my core adolescent male years (ages nine to forty-one). Out of nowhere, late in the year, she informed me that I would be taking her to see The Two Towers. She was raising my niece full-time2 and essentially never left the house for anything like an interest of her own. Her seclusion was the result of a tasty cocktail of housework discipline, frugality, and growing agoraphobia. But this thing she wanted. She told me and my father that she would be going, I would drive her, and my dad would watch my niece Olivia. This woman who lived at the behest of her husband was issuing one of her rare executive orders for a thing I never would have imagined interested her. I asked her why. I could always ask my mom why and expect a good answer. “I saw the first one on HBO. It was intense, like a good war movie,” she said to me. She was fifty-one years old and she’d fallen in love with a thing I’d fallen for fifteen years earlier. She loved it, but it would not rank in her top fifty movies, if she ever took the time to list them, which she wouldn’t. My mom doesn’t have a favorite movie because she loves movies. And things. And me.
My dad’s favorite movie was The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. Until this week, I had never seen it. That’s because my dad never expressed a desire to see it. My dad wasn’t deferential. He didn’t just watch what we wanted to watch. He was quite forward in expressing his distaste for things. My father loved little, but he had scorn to go around. He was always vetoing pieces of culture as frivolous, silly, “fruity,” or boring. He watched endless TCM with my mother in his later years, rolling through decades of classic cinema, including many westerns. Through VHS, DVD, cable TV, and streaming, I never once heard him say, “I want to watch The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.” But I always knew it was his favorite film.
Until this week in August 2017, one year, six months, and five days since he had a heart attack at a Division of the State Architect seminar in Oakland, I had never watched The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. I’d never sought it out. I’d never imagined it might have value or be a tool to knowing this man.
Because I knew him. I knew my father, Larry Michael Branum, better than anyone knew him. My mother and his mother knew him longer than I did, and my uncle Kevin worked with him every day for fifteen years, but I knew him better. And I did not know him well.
Yesterday, I got sad that I’d never asked him why he liked The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, that it might have been some path into his heart I’d never seen before, but as quickly as I thought it, I remembered the truth. My dad would have said it was “a good western” or “had lots of action” or “real clear-cut good guys and bad guys.” Or maybe he would have told me a story about going to see it in San Francisco when he was ten years old, and how that made him feel. That would have been the best answer. My dad didn’t know why he liked things. He could only describe them in rote, normal, unchallengeable ways. He liked the things he was supposed to like, or tried really hard to do so.
My dad feared thinking in ways that would not make immediate sense to others. I did not make sense to others.
My father never said, “I want you to see The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.”
The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance is an achingly resonant work about my relationship with my father. In 1962, my father watched and loved a film that was fundamentally about the tensions that would make communication between the two of us difficult or impossible. It is a film about two men with fundamentally different worldviews trying to cooperate and only briefly succeeding.
The film begins with a frame tale. Jimmy Stewart plays Senator Ransom Stoddard (are you lethargic from the weight of western hokeyness yet?) who returns to the town of Shinbone (it will get worse), Generic Western State, with his wife, Hallie (the unsubtle Vera Miles), because Someone Very Important has died. A young, handsome local reporter, evocative of all the qualities of white masculinity that we, and the West, believe in, notes the coming of the senator and alerts his editor. The newsmen follow Ranse (et ux) to the undertaker’s shack, where they meet Pompey, a physically imposing but responsibly subservient black man, and the simple pine box that contains Tom Doniphon, the Someone Very Important whom the senator has come to see. The newsmen are perplexed as to why s
omeone so dazzling as the senator would be in town to see someone, but they would have no idea who this Tom Doniphon is. When we see the senator insist that Tom be buried with his boots and pistol on, we understand. Tom Doniphon is not the kind of fancy such effeminate folk as newspaper editors would know. Tom Doniphon is a Real Man. Of course, that means he is played by John Wayne.
My dad wouldn’t have wanted to be buried in cowboy boots or with a pistol, but I think he would have liked for us to bury him in a pair of work boots, with his cement trowel. We had him cremated. I don’t know what he was wearing, if anything. The thing about my dad is he would have liked to have been buried with pistol or trowel, but if he’d been willing to contemplate death enough to write a will or express end-of-life desires, he would have instructed us to bury him in a suit. Because that’s what men do. But he didn’t, so my mom had him cremated because she doesn’t really care what other people think.
Ranse Stoddard tells the newspapermen the real story of Tom Doniphon. It requires us to go back thirty or so years. Fresh from law school, Ranse rode into the territory on a stagecoach that was held up by the infamous Liberty Valance, played with gleeful masochism by Lee Marvin. Valance is a general-services villain who robs, vandalizes, and batters for personal joy, and to promote the general interests of the plutocratic cattle barons who influence our plot but whom we never see in human form. Valance steals Ranse’s pocket watch (a gift from his father) and soils his law books, but it’s when Valance challenges the inviolable status of a widow-woman by stealing her brooch that Ranse tries to stop him.
Ranse is beaten and left for dead, but a few days later, he is brought into town on the back of Tom Doniphon’s wagon. Doniphon and Pompey bring him to a chow house where a young Hallie works, and the movie starts being the movie. Ranse believes in law; he wants the town marshal to arrest Valance. Unfortunately, the town marshal, like all representatives of education, culture, or government in Shinbone, is useless: Marshal Appleyard is fat; the newspaper editor, Peabody, is a drunk; and the town doctor, Willoughby, is old, silly, and drunk. Doniphon assures everyone that Valance will respect nothing but the business end of a gun, and he will continue to cruelly dominate the people of Shinbone. Valance does just that, threatening to stop the town from sending pro-statehood delegates to a territorial convention, something about the aforementioned unseen ranchers benefiting from territorial status. The point is, Valance is nefarious chaos, and finally, the weak and lawful Ranse picks up a gun to stop him, and it works. Ranse shoots Liberty and the town is saved.