Duck and Cover
Octavio Roca, a card-carrying member of the Gay Left, does his best duck-and-cover when it comes to facing the notion that (gasp!) there's more than one way to live the fabulous gay life.
"The year's scariest horror movie happens to be a documentary, and (Wash Westmoreland's 'Gay Republicans') is it. Gay Republicans is one of those concepts -- like, say, Jews for Hitler or the MLK chapter of the KKK -- that sound more than a little creepy."
And here I thought the whole Bush = Hitler / Republicans = Nazis meme was just sad and tired enough to have dropped off the pop culture lexicon by now. Silly me.
But it gets even better: ""I would feel more comfortable in a room full of Republicans than in a room full of gays," says one of the self-loathing queers interviewed in Wash Westmoreland's fair and balanced film. Some of them include a Palm Beach hairdresser desperate to fit in with the crowd whose hair he does, an especially repugnant frosted-hair conventioneer, and others of that trash-with-money ilk."
I suppose we're to assume from the above that Roca doesn't have any money and, therefore, feels both morally and socially superior existing simply as trash without any of the dreaded complications and concurrent responsibilities connected with wealth, but it's difficult to know for certain. What we can know for certain, however, is that Octavio Roca is a marginal Arts & Entertainment critic for the just as marginal Miami New Times, concocting bodice-heaving prose pieces, cleverly disguised as reviews, that Jacqueline Susann could only gaze upon in sheer envy.
Such is the lofty perch from which to sneeer upon "frosted hair conventioneer"s.
Our Octavio covers Dance, Theater and Film with an emotional rapacity that less-enlightened denizens of the New Age might be forgiven for labeling over-the-top. For Example: TOUCH, a play by Toni Press-Coffman: "a lovely pastiche of raw feelings, of the awkward dance to the music of faith and reason . . . The fragile tenderness of a prostitute's touch rings true, but its resonance is dampened by clichés."
Uh-huh. And then there's luna del pingüino by Octavio Campos: "Campos in his moonscape boasts a buto master's patience and the insouciance of a French mime, Lipsynka's drag sensibility and the seriousness of Pina Bausch. He is a convert on a holy mission to please."
Right, gotcha -- 'cause French mime and bad San Francisco drag is what every serious artist longs to be compared to. And then there's his predictably obsequious critique of It's a Fabulous Life!, a "loose and merry musical adaptation" (i.e. blatant ripoff) of Frank Capra's classic film, It's a Wonderful Life. And it's GAY!: "The gay hero of "It's A Fabulous Life!" is facing troubles Jimmy Stewart's George Bailey never dreamed of in "It's A Wonderful Life": Four more years of Dubya, for starters, with fundamentalist bigots on the rise, yahoos baying for blood in the halls of Congress and right-wing ayatollahs ready to pounce and crush any semblance of diversity, tolerance and hope."
He makes it sound like South Beach circa 2005 is Cuba on a bad day. Are things really that bleak for poor Octavio? Let's read further and find out.
"The time is the last presidential election," Octavio pens dourly, near the end of his brief but distraught reportage of 'Gay Republicans', "and several Log Cabin Republicans find their blind faith shattered as they struggle to support a candidate who makes a fetish of kissing the ass of the Christian right even if that means writing bigotry into the Constitution and trampling on the civil rights of gay citizens. It's not a pretty picture."
Oh dear!
Perhaps it was simply the unambiguous quality of the documentary format that's to blame, twisting Roca into the peevish little knot from which he seemed to have scribbled his review of conservative gays Wash Westmoreland's film. No prostitutes to romanticize, no drag queens to identify with, no beefcakes twirling about in song and dance -- it must have been a truly brutal and terrifying experience for poor Octavio to witness a world in which his gay-ghetto rainbow sensibilities are duly shunned like last night's blind date when the drugs wear off.
It's not a pretty picture, indeed.