Daniel Reitz is a genius. For months after the Andrew Cunanan murders, I bitched that the one aspect of the story that NOBODY was talking about was the shallowness of the rich A-list fags who built the man up, went to his parties, took his money, fucked him, and never concerned their gym-bunny selves with the fact that he was sick, false, empty, and narcissistic at the core. Well, I was wrong. Someone did talk about it—Daniel Reitz in these two essays, “Cunanan the Barbarian“ and “A Timely Death.”
Finally, a serial killer we can really hate.
Recently a fellow fag, some flunky script reader for some indie film company, held his nose over a film script of mine, in which a queer man takes revenge on a Jersey hood who bashed him and his lover, sniffing that “gay men ... don’t stray into hate-crime violence.”
As I write this, a week has passed since Gianni Versace, world-renowned fashion designer and homosexual, was shot twice in the head by another homosexual, psycho spree killer Andrew Phillip Cunanan. I don’t know about you, but it seems to me that this particular example of serial killing might qualify as a hate crime, if not in the usual political sense. Andrew Cunanan is pissed about something, and I don’t think it was haute couture that prompted him to shoot, bludgeon, stab and slash his way across the country.
My guess is that he’s tortured by the revelation of his HIV-positive status, and the bloody trail he’s been leaving since April is his way of mourning his lost fly-girl lifestyle by making other fags pay, as well as the occasional heterosexual who just happens to be in possession of the perfect getaway vehicle.
Thinking about the pass-the-smelling-salts delicacy of the above-mentioned script reader, I reflect on a glorious tradition of gay men treating other gay men to their own special brand of endearment: For example, the legacy of club queen Michael Alig—who shot his gay roommate due to a dispute over rent and then threw him into the river—will live on in homo hearts forever. I’m also reminded of something Spike Lee once said: Black people are incapable of racism. Seemingly, this kind of idiot’s logic has worked its way into the PC conscience of certain homosexuals who simply can’t believe that all us “gays” aren’t living in a fairy paradise of Shabby Chic sofas, post-workout iced mocha lattes, George Clooney look-alike lovers and a closet full of Gianni Versace.
Of course, there is far more anonymous, if less sensational, violence played out on a daily basis behind more gay and lesbian doors than we care to think about. I’ve witnessed a fair share of it myself; I’ve even doled it out. I’m aware that, to many gay folks, image equals credibility. After the Versace killing, a cultured homosexual gentleman of my acquaintance groaned, “Why does he (Cunanan) have to be gay?” The fact that most of the victims were gay didn’t seem to enter into it. After all, what is the sound of a queer tree falling in a hetero forest?
Why is this? Partly because we seem to have embraced that utopian myth that gay people don’t—can’t—actually hurt each other, unless of course it’s consensual. Sure, we argue, we get drunk, we get flirty with strangers at a bar, a little carried away with our fave drugs or debt. But such peccadilloes never make us violent. How could they? We are, as the word implies, gay.
We might be better off if we tossed out the batter-bowl of mushy, fluffernutter queer correctness that still dictates how we’re supposed to come across to the world. Rather than thinking about what a Cunanan does to our collective image, we would do well to face the fact that we’re as capable of the same destructive behavior as everybody else. I used to think during the glory days of ACT-UP and Queer Nation that we queers were all in it together. I realize now how ridiculously naive a notion that was. I have seen more instances of bad behavior perpetrated by one gay person against another than I have space to describe; usually, it’s in a “harmless” social context—rampant selfishness, egotism, dishonesty, power plays, head games. But sometimes it isn’t so “harmless.” And there’s no gay bashing, emotional or physical, like one from a “brother.”
At this point, I’d like to vent on the weasel Andrew Phillip Cunanan. Obviously you can’t apply Emily Post’s rules of etiquette to psychopaths, but Cunanan is the most obnoxious kind of spree killer to have driven down the Florida freeway: prissy, pouty and preppy. With all due respect to the families of Jeffrey Dahmer’s victims, I had more sympathy for Dahmer’s sickness than for Cunanan’s. At least Dahmer, when he spoke of being relieved that he was finally behind bars and away from a world vulnerable to a psychosis he couldn’t control, showed that some embers of humanity still glowed within him. All evidence seems to indicate that Cunanan wants to be caught, too. But as I look at his smarmy, smirking smile flashed on TV and read the newspaper accounts, all I see is a squinty-eyed, ostrich-eating, champagne-swilling, social-climbing whore who barely worked a day in his life, who flirted and fucked his way to nowhere but the next gay pit stop, who just couldn’t get over the fact that he wasn’t born a Kennedy, that his father didn’t own a sugar plantation in the Philippines but was just a sad, allegedly crooked loser who deserted the family, and who’s furious at the world for being HIV-positive.
Then there was the other image splashed across my TV screen—the ambitious, excessive, hedonistic, sexy, celebrated Gianni Versace being rushed down a sun-drenched Miami street on a stretcher, his handsome white head thick and dripping with blood. And for a moment it was easy to forget (especially for the FBI) about Cunanan’s other victims, who were not necessarily friends of Madonna and Naomi and Courtney, the lesser-known ones like Jeffrey Trail, David Madson, Lee Miglin, William Reese. Or maybe it’s all just a bad dream. After all, we’re not violent. As the script reader insisted, we’re lovers, not killers.
—July 22, 1997
(http://www.salonmagazine.com/july97/news/news970722.html)
________________________________________
A Timely Death
Now that Andrew Cunanan is out of the way, gays can go back to their old narcissistic, self-absorbed ways, all in the name of “pride.”
Andrew Cunanan died just in time. Old friends in his former stomping ground of San Diego were able to proceed with their annual gay pride festivities this weekend without a hitch—no pesky sniper fire, no ominous sightings of the smirking spree-killer, no murderous “visits” to old acquaintances. Breathing a collective sigh of relief, the denizens of the Hillcrest neighborhood indulged in such pride-inspiring activities as “The Harbor Cruz,” “Circuit Daze” and “The Zoo Party” without once looking over their bare shoulders. And of course, where would gay pride be without the Parade? The theme of this year’s was “Share the Vision.” That just about covered everything in one big soufflé of solidarity.
But can the San Diego festivities overcome the legacy of the area’s most notorious homosexual so soon after his demise? Cunanan was ultimately responsible for his own pathology. He was an über-queer, the quintessence of sadism and bad form. But if you magnified him a thousand times you might find him emblematic of any number of witless queers I have known: clinically narcissistic, intent in the pursuit of hedonism, zealous in avoidance of consequences and unfeeling in the extreme.
Still, as in San Diego, and in New York and San Francisco last month, the beat goes on, the parade floats go up and the boys come out flaunting a “pride” too often based on the false sense of self gay people acquire when they allow their entire identities as human beings to be submerged in their sexuality—I fuck, therefore I am.
Take, for instance, the Chelsea Clones—a bunch of brainless gym bunnies residing in an area of Manhattan north of the West Village and south of midtown. To the Clones—identical slabs of femmy beefcake who lounge around the Big Cup Caf fresh from a workout and steam-room wank session—being out and proud means being one in a crowd. Their contempt for the aging invert is as thick as their health shakes; they dismiss with a smirky, self-satisfied turn of the head any and all lesser physical specimens. The only reading they do is the free queer classifieds, which they don’t really read at all but use as a prop to cruise some pansy pod person over their grande Mocha lattes. These are the same queers who, at every gay pride parade, nude from the waist up, waist down in skin-tight Ray Dragon bike shorts, embrace each other and get all misty-eyed during the moment of silence for all the brothers dead from the big A. As if that makes up for the other 364 days of mind-numbing self-absorption.
Pride begins and ends with self-realization and acceptance. I think of myself at 11, facing with dread the awareness that I was what no one but evil perverts choose to be, and yet I didn’t choose; I was guilty of a “crime” I didn’t commit, and the punishment, I thought, was a life sentence of silent suffering and self-loathing, with no parole. It took me years to realize I had an innate sense of my ability to survive, and I came to draw on reserves of strength that most heterosexuals don’t have a clue about; and that’s something you can’t parade down the avenue once a year.
But I also part company with those who believe that merely existing as a gay man or woman is, in and of itself, something to be proud of, any more than being born black or a woman. Being born wasn’t your doing. Neither was being gay. So why should you be “proud” of something you didn’t even do?
In last month’s New York Pride Parade, the hottest float (partly because of the go-go boys dancing on it) was an advertisement urging uninfected gays to keep themselves HIV negative. You wouldn’t think that such a message needs to be advertised 16 years after the epidemic made itself known, but there it was, replete with hip-hop attitude and club music accompaniment: It’s cool to be sane! Living is sexy! That’s not pride, it’s self-preservation, and in 1997 gay men shouldn’t need to be reminded that you need to “play safe.” The message really means that in 1997, we’re guilty of the same behavior we exhibited in 1977—self-gratification at any price—and that is not something to be proud of.
In the context of our continued self-annihilation, Andrew Philip Cunanan was a speck. We have to realize that we are all potential killers. It’s not enough to shake our asses on a parade float. It’s not enough to echo mawkish platitudes about murderous old acquaintances—“That’s not the Andrew I knew,” some left-behind friend in California declared in all his pious banality. And it’s certainly not enough to think we’re making progress when we still have to convince ourselves of the merits of not fucking each other to death.
Finally, a serial killer we can really hate.
Recently a fellow fag, some flunky script reader for some indie film company, held his nose over a film script of mine, in which a queer man takes revenge on a Jersey hood who bashed him and his lover, sniffing that “gay men ... don’t stray into hate-crime violence.”
As I write this, a week has passed since Gianni Versace, world-renowned fashion designer and homosexual, was shot twice in the head by another homosexual, psycho spree killer Andrew Phillip Cunanan. I don’t know about you, but it seems to me that this particular example of serial killing might qualify as a hate crime, if not in the usual political sense. Andrew Cunanan is pissed about something, and I don’t think it was haute couture that prompted him to shoot, bludgeon, stab and slash his way across the country.
My guess is that he’s tortured by the revelation of his HIV-positive status, and the bloody trail he’s been leaving since April is his way of mourning his lost fly-girl lifestyle by making other fags pay, as well as the occasional heterosexual who just happens to be in possession of the perfect getaway vehicle.
Thinking about the pass-the-smelling-salts delicacy of the above-mentioned script reader, I reflect on a glorious tradition of gay men treating other gay men to their own special brand of endearment: For example, the legacy of club queen Michael Alig—who shot his gay roommate due to a dispute over rent and then threw him into the river—will live on in homo hearts forever. I’m also reminded of something Spike Lee once said: Black people are incapable of racism. Seemingly, this kind of idiot’s logic has worked its way into the PC conscience of certain homosexuals who simply can’t believe that all us “gays” aren’t living in a fairy paradise of Shabby Chic sofas, post-workout iced mocha lattes, George Clooney look-alike lovers and a closet full of Gianni Versace.
Of course, there is far more anonymous, if less sensational, violence played out on a daily basis behind more gay and lesbian doors than we care to think about. I’ve witnessed a fair share of it myself; I’ve even doled it out. I’m aware that, to many gay folks, image equals credibility. After the Versace killing, a cultured homosexual gentleman of my acquaintance groaned, “Why does he (Cunanan) have to be gay?” The fact that most of the victims were gay didn’t seem to enter into it. After all, what is the sound of a queer tree falling in a hetero forest?
Why is this? Partly because we seem to have embraced that utopian myth that gay people don’t—can’t—actually hurt each other, unless of course it’s consensual. Sure, we argue, we get drunk, we get flirty with strangers at a bar, a little carried away with our fave drugs or debt. But such peccadilloes never make us violent. How could they? We are, as the word implies, gay.
We might be better off if we tossed out the batter-bowl of mushy, fluffernutter queer correctness that still dictates how we’re supposed to come across to the world. Rather than thinking about what a Cunanan does to our collective image, we would do well to face the fact that we’re as capable of the same destructive behavior as everybody else. I used to think during the glory days of ACT-UP and Queer Nation that we queers were all in it together. I realize now how ridiculously naive a notion that was. I have seen more instances of bad behavior perpetrated by one gay person against another than I have space to describe; usually, it’s in a “harmless” social context—rampant selfishness, egotism, dishonesty, power plays, head games. But sometimes it isn’t so “harmless.” And there’s no gay bashing, emotional or physical, like one from a “brother.”
At this point, I’d like to vent on the weasel Andrew Phillip Cunanan. Obviously you can’t apply Emily Post’s rules of etiquette to psychopaths, but Cunanan is the most obnoxious kind of spree killer to have driven down the Florida freeway: prissy, pouty and preppy. With all due respect to the families of Jeffrey Dahmer’s victims, I had more sympathy for Dahmer’s sickness than for Cunanan’s. At least Dahmer, when he spoke of being relieved that he was finally behind bars and away from a world vulnerable to a psychosis he couldn’t control, showed that some embers of humanity still glowed within him. All evidence seems to indicate that Cunanan wants to be caught, too. But as I look at his smarmy, smirking smile flashed on TV and read the newspaper accounts, all I see is a squinty-eyed, ostrich-eating, champagne-swilling, social-climbing whore who barely worked a day in his life, who flirted and fucked his way to nowhere but the next gay pit stop, who just couldn’t get over the fact that he wasn’t born a Kennedy, that his father didn’t own a sugar plantation in the Philippines but was just a sad, allegedly crooked loser who deserted the family, and who’s furious at the world for being HIV-positive.
Then there was the other image splashed across my TV screen—the ambitious, excessive, hedonistic, sexy, celebrated Gianni Versace being rushed down a sun-drenched Miami street on a stretcher, his handsome white head thick and dripping with blood. And for a moment it was easy to forget (especially for the FBI) about Cunanan’s other victims, who were not necessarily friends of Madonna and Naomi and Courtney, the lesser-known ones like Jeffrey Trail, David Madson, Lee Miglin, William Reese. Or maybe it’s all just a bad dream. After all, we’re not violent. As the script reader insisted, we’re lovers, not killers.
—July 22, 1997
(http://www.salonmagazine.com/july97/news/news970722.html)
________________________________________
A Timely Death
Now that Andrew Cunanan is out of the way, gays can go back to their old narcissistic, self-absorbed ways, all in the name of “pride.”
Andrew Cunanan died just in time. Old friends in his former stomping ground of San Diego were able to proceed with their annual gay pride festivities this weekend without a hitch—no pesky sniper fire, no ominous sightings of the smirking spree-killer, no murderous “visits” to old acquaintances. Breathing a collective sigh of relief, the denizens of the Hillcrest neighborhood indulged in such pride-inspiring activities as “The Harbor Cruz,” “Circuit Daze” and “The Zoo Party” without once looking over their bare shoulders. And of course, where would gay pride be without the Parade? The theme of this year’s was “Share the Vision.” That just about covered everything in one big soufflé of solidarity.
But can the San Diego festivities overcome the legacy of the area’s most notorious homosexual so soon after his demise? Cunanan was ultimately responsible for his own pathology. He was an über-queer, the quintessence of sadism and bad form. But if you magnified him a thousand times you might find him emblematic of any number of witless queers I have known: clinically narcissistic, intent in the pursuit of hedonism, zealous in avoidance of consequences and unfeeling in the extreme.
Still, as in San Diego, and in New York and San Francisco last month, the beat goes on, the parade floats go up and the boys come out flaunting a “pride” too often based on the false sense of self gay people acquire when they allow their entire identities as human beings to be submerged in their sexuality—I fuck, therefore I am.
Take, for instance, the Chelsea Clones—a bunch of brainless gym bunnies residing in an area of Manhattan north of the West Village and south of midtown. To the Clones—identical slabs of femmy beefcake who lounge around the Big Cup Caf fresh from a workout and steam-room wank session—being out and proud means being one in a crowd. Their contempt for the aging invert is as thick as their health shakes; they dismiss with a smirky, self-satisfied turn of the head any and all lesser physical specimens. The only reading they do is the free queer classifieds, which they don’t really read at all but use as a prop to cruise some pansy pod person over their grande Mocha lattes. These are the same queers who, at every gay pride parade, nude from the waist up, waist down in skin-tight Ray Dragon bike shorts, embrace each other and get all misty-eyed during the moment of silence for all the brothers dead from the big A. As if that makes up for the other 364 days of mind-numbing self-absorption.
Pride begins and ends with self-realization and acceptance. I think of myself at 11, facing with dread the awareness that I was what no one but evil perverts choose to be, and yet I didn’t choose; I was guilty of a “crime” I didn’t commit, and the punishment, I thought, was a life sentence of silent suffering and self-loathing, with no parole. It took me years to realize I had an innate sense of my ability to survive, and I came to draw on reserves of strength that most heterosexuals don’t have a clue about; and that’s something you can’t parade down the avenue once a year.
But I also part company with those who believe that merely existing as a gay man or woman is, in and of itself, something to be proud of, any more than being born black or a woman. Being born wasn’t your doing. Neither was being gay. So why should you be “proud” of something you didn’t even do?
In last month’s New York Pride Parade, the hottest float (partly because of the go-go boys dancing on it) was an advertisement urging uninfected gays to keep themselves HIV negative. You wouldn’t think that such a message needs to be advertised 16 years after the epidemic made itself known, but there it was, replete with hip-hop attitude and club music accompaniment: It’s cool to be sane! Living is sexy! That’s not pride, it’s self-preservation, and in 1997 gay men shouldn’t need to be reminded that you need to “play safe.” The message really means that in 1997, we’re guilty of the same behavior we exhibited in 1977—self-gratification at any price—and that is not something to be proud of.
In the context of our continued self-annihilation, Andrew Philip Cunanan was a speck. We have to realize that we are all potential killers. It’s not enough to shake our asses on a parade float. It’s not enough to echo mawkish platitudes about murderous old acquaintances—“That’s not the Andrew I knew,” some left-behind friend in California declared in all his pious banality. And it’s certainly not enough to think we’re making progress when we still have to convince ourselves of the merits of not fucking each other to death.
—July 28, 1997
(http://www.salonmagazine.com/july97/news/news970728.html)
________________________________________
Daniel Reitz is a playwright and screenwriter living in New York, currently turning his play Urban Folktales into a screenplay.
0 comments:
Post a Comment