babygray

For the past three days, I kept running into homosexual and homoerotic undertones... and not even from the usual, expected sources.


Last week, BBC Radio 4 Extra aired radio dramatizations of the Tom Ripley books. All I knew of it was that Matt Damon starred in The Talented Mr. Ripley and that Ripley was crazy, murdering, maybe-gay man. Now I find myself falling in love a bit with Patricia Highsmith. There were some choice lines in the dramatizations, and I think I'd enjoy more of her writing.

The Boy Who Followed Ripley is the one I most want to read for myself. Ripley takes the boy, Frank, to West Berlin's gay scene at one point, and the way the dramatization kept pointing out Ripley's growing... love? Affection? General non-murderous feelings for the boy really caught my attention. (Little analytical thought: Frank tells Ripley that he did have sexual issues with the love of his life, Teresa. In the dramatization, he said this after Ripley mentally notes that Frank might not be of the heterosexual persuasion. I'm not sure if it was Ripley's subconscious wishful thinking that made him assume that, or that fact that he saw so much of himself in the teenager. Gonna have to read it to see, I guess...)

The other dramatization I heard on the BBC this weekend was The Mysterious Death of Jane Austen, and that one was even more surprising. One, because it was based on a crime novel, and the other because the main character, a governess that once tutored Austen's niece, is shown to be very much in love with Austen. Regency lesbianism, ho!

The local news had an impromtu-ish survey on movies about forbidden love. Brokeback Mountain was #1, but at one point they mentioned Hitchcock's Vertigo and Rope, a story about two men who kill a third.

While searching for a naughty copy of Rope, I find instead The Celluloid Closet. (Youtube had a copy of that, but not of Rope... in English. ;_;)

The documentary presented me with a huge amount of things to think about. For example, near the end of the doc, they point out that gay characters, good or bad, tend to end up dead. Redemption Equals Death, they guess. Now I find myself trying to think of a mainstream Hollywood movie that has a gay hero that (a) is the actual protagonist and not there for comic relief and (b) gets a happy ending.

... I haven't come up with one yet, but that's probably because I haven't been thinking hard enough?

Speaking of comic relief gays, guess what showed up in my novela? I've been watching too many episodes of La Mujer del Vendaval in a row (a tragic mistake), and now I think I'm overdosing.

Frankly, I'm getting sick of how fundamentally STUPID the heroes are. I happily wish they would all die. I still want to see what happens (never mind that the Wiki page spoiled the whole damn thing), and that the villains get their come-uppances, but these CHARACTERS! The badass, shotgun-toting cowgirl lead keeps getting knocked into submissive-wifey mode to keep her man happy. The older secondary pair are bunch of dolts. The plot is drenched in conservatism (the main pair's "We're getting married for real, i.e. in the church" and the aunt's "Can't divorce evil, adulterous husband because of GOD" are MAJOR plot points). And now, the walking "joke" that is the two sissies (to use the documentary's labeling) is sapping away more of my good will.

I can't even enjoy the antics of the evil cousin. (Definitely overdosing a bit.)

Sigh.

As for the expected sources, I wrote a sex scene (which I will never post) for the sake of getting it out of my head. I was working on the next bit of "A Series of Events" when I had what I thought was a great idea: perving up the detention scene in Half-Blood Prince, the one after the bathroom scene and before Harry's kiss with Ginny.  But the more I wrote it out, the more I was skeeved by the whole scenario: Snape sneakily masturbating with Harry still in the room. I know I'm not the first to think of it, and I hope I can find someone else's version of it, if only to get my version out of my head for good.