The Paradox of 1960s Erotica

This weekend I was in Chicago to visit Annabelle and to do some research on a new project. For the project (which I'll talk about later), I spent part of the day on Saturday and Sunday at the Leather Archives & Museum in East Rogers Park looking at vintage erotica and learning about the history of the Chicago gay leather scene. I've already written almost a year ago about LA&M's exhibits on the history of the gay leather community in Chicago and their wonderful collection of books about BDSM -- I'm still looking for a private collection to equal it in New York.

Most of the erotica that I looked at at LA&M this weekend was the pulp variety from the 1960s. It always strikes me how very different old erotica is from today's variety. Today, erotica stories tend to be fairly realistic depictions of sexual encounters you could actually have. Not so in the pulp stories of the past. Those stories are full of fantastic and bizarre situations. They take place in exotic locales -- Europe, New Orleans and (the most debauched of all) New York. They're filled with immoral Oriental girls and insatiable mulattos who coerce their victims with razor blades. And despite the fact that these books were being labeled obscene and their writers, publishers and distributors persecuted for being moral degenerates, the stories are -- fascinatingly -- full of negative messages about sex. Promiscuous female characters are shamed as sluts and harlots. As surely as the sun rises, a woman who gets a taste of sex will fall into a spiral of depravity and degradation, homosexuals usually end up dead, and sadists are possessed of an uncontrollable bloodlust that inevitably leads to murder.

This echo of moral judgement is one of the most fascinating things about erotica of this period -- the very condemnation and sex-negativism that interfered with the sale of this kind of material is the source of most of most of its stories. It nearly qualifies as Stockholm Syndrome. The books ridicule and perpetuate harmful stereotypes about the very kind of people who presumably consumed them. Why do the authors and publishers decry and lament the conditions that allow them to make a living? Why do the readers of these appreciate such a thorough denunciation of perverts like them (or, at least, the type of pervert they would be if they could find the courage)? It is paradoxical, so say the least!

Another striking thing about these books is how many of them insist that the subject matter is true. Often this comes as a disclaimer on the cover or before the title page that goes something like this: "I wish I could tell you what you're about to read was fiction but, sadly, every horrible word of it is true." It then goes on to explain that the names, locations and other particulars of this true account have been changed to protect the identity of the characters from anyone who might try to fact-check the "true story."

Another variation on this theme is the so-called "documentary" book. These expose the "sordid" details of the underground sexual communities of the day -- homosexuals, sadomasochists, sex workers -- in a format that poses as either journalism or psychology. One suspects from the very unrealistic dialogue in the "interviews" that the material in most of these books is made up wholesale, but some of the most famous ones are probably actual reportage. These books are so fascinating because they both condemn sexual "perversion" while at the same time feeding it. I mean, for what reason would anyone buy such a book except for the thrill of reading about all the hot things it condemns? One wonders how many people found their sexual subcultures after reading condemnations of them in books like Louis Berg's The Velvet Underground.

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While at the Leather Archives, I also had the chance to see a fascinating documentary by filmmaker Ron Pajak called Quearborn and Perversion. The film details the history of the gay community in Chicago, beginning in the 1934 and ending in 1974. The film was a fascinating account of what it meant to be gay and lesbian in one of America's toughest cities at that time. It takes it's name from the Chicago police department's nickname for the corner of Dearborn and Division Streets, a prominent gay cruising area at that time.

I wish I could discuss the film at length but I was recovering from the flu that night and rather loopy, so some of the details are eluding me today. However, I did very much enjoy the Q&A after the film with director Ron Pajak and Chuck Renslow, who opened the famous leather bar Gold Coast in June 1958 and spoke very eloquently about the period, including some interesting anecdotes about bribing the police to avoid raids.

The Vault - Shortbus

Shortbus (2006)
directed & written by John Cameron Mitchell
starring: Raphael Barker, Lindsay Beamish, Justin Bond, Jay Brannan, Paul Dawson, PJ DeBoy, Sook-Yin Lee, Peter Stickles

The Internet has made film images of sex so commonplace that in this decade several independent filmmakers have declared that they were going to take the next step -- bring real sex scenes into legitimate cinema. But every time a filmmaker claimed they were the one who had finally integrated sex into storytelling I was disappointed. In Vincent Gallo's Brown Bunny the blowjob scene seemed like a tacked-on stunt to get people to see an otherwise banal movie, and the French film Baise-moi was an atrocious nightmare filled with violence and negative, self-destructive sex. Those films flirted with the barrier between porn and independent film. The film finally tore it down was John Cameron Mitchell's Shortbus.

The film is set in a post-9/11 New York. It's ensemble cast is an attractive yet real-looking group in their twenties and thirties that represent most of the sexual spectrum: straight, gay, vanilla, kinky, monogamous, polyamorous, sex workers, voyeurs and genderqueers, all present and accounted for. The one constant in this rainbow of sexual diversity is that all of the characters are looking for something from sex that will complete them. To find it they converge on Shortbus, a idiosyncratic club in Brooklyn that celebrates art and sex by blurring the line between them. Based on the real-life Dumba (now defunct), Shortbus is the place to go for everything from pretentious film festivals to joyous orgies.

The central storyline -- Sofia, a sex therapist in her thirties, has never had an orgasm and is on a quest to get one -- is a bit of a cliché but that doesn't matter so much since this is a film one watches for the characters and atmosphere. The gays are up to more interesting hijinks. James, who is secretly depressed and suicidal, is trying to create a triad with Ceth so his boyfriend Jamie will have support after James dies; all the while they're being followed by Caleb, a voyeur. And Severin, a pro domme who is miserable because her need to control every situation keeps the whole world at arms length is tormented by an impish client as she tries to form a real friendship with Sofia. All this frustration and sexual energy builds up through the movie until it literally blows a fuse, metaphorically resulting in the 2003 New York blackout.

The movie is set up to give us a peak into the lives of these characters rather than to fully explore their background. A tantilizing hint is dropped that Sofia's unability to orgasm might be related to her strict Asian father, but the film doesn't pursue the matter. We also never find out why James is suicidal. His history as a young prostitute may have something to do with it but when he talks about those days it sounds like he was already depressed. The video he's shooting as an explanation/suicide note (which seems to be based on Jonathan Caouette's Tarnation) is full of interesting images but I wasn't able to glean any clues. The first time I viewed the film I felt John Cameron Mitchell's ensemble cast, who helped write the movie, had gotten lazy with their character work. On further viewings I realized the point wasn't to plumb the depths of these people but rather to meet them in passing as you might in the real world.

But this movie's greatest achievement is to integrate sex into storytelling in as just another human activity. It's difficult to de-emphasize the fact that the actors are actually performing sex acts on each other because it's such a novelty in movie making. John Cameron Mitchell manages it by keeping his sex scenes short and often playing them for humor: straight people trying unsatisfying sex in every position of the kama sutra, a gay man singing the national anthem into his partner's ass, a submissive ejaculating on a Jackson Pollack painting, etc. This film makes sex seem normal, ironically, by playing up the one aspect that is normally left out of porn or Hollywood sex scenes -- the fact that sex is frequently ridiculous as well as hot.

In other words, the sex in Shortbus is sex we recognize from our own lives, shown on screen for the first time.

The Vault - Secretary

Secretary (2002)
directed by Steven Shainberg
written by Erin Cressida Wilson, based on a short story by Mary Gaitskill
starring: Maggie Gyllenhaal, James Spader, Jeremy Davies

Before you see it you expect the clichés: leather, whips, corsets and high-heeled, knee-high boots. You won't see those things at any time in Secretary. What you will see in the film's hypnotic opening shot is Maggie Gyllanhaal slinking gracefully through the office in a normal, if slightly old fashion, skirt and blouse and -- oh, yes -- her wrists restrained at the ends of a positively dainty spreader bar linked to her leather collar.

Secretary is a romantic comedy about a dominant-submissive relationship that forms between the titular secretary, Lee Holliway (Maggie Gyllenhaal), and her shy, sensitive lawyer boss, E. Edward Grey (James Spader). Miss Holliway and Mr. Grey's relationship doesn't involve much violence, aside from one fairly memorable spanking scene. What is on display in this movie is the care and attention to details necessary for one person to sweep another away in a healthy, loving power dynamic relationship.

I recently rewatched the movie with a group of friends, including one who had never seen it before and wasn't much for BDSM. This friend's discomfort was palpable all the way through the movie. Men and women alike, we have become feminists. We like our women empowered. That's why the paradox posed by Secretary fucks with our heads the way that it does. Should women be so empowered that they have the right to give up that power to a man they trust? If you think the answer is yes, you're probably in the minority, sadly enough. The beauty of Secretary is that it posed as a harmless little romance and put that question out there for a mainstream audience. It's also difficult to deny how hot it is to watch Lee and Mr. Grey's little pas de deux, so if you are one of those who think what they're seeing is wrong the filmmakers have pretty successfully implicated you in the crime they're staging.

The characters in this movie are probably the world's perfect dominant and perfect submissive, which is a credit to both the screenwriter and the actors who bring them to life. Lee comes from a dysfunctional family. She has developed a deep need to please those around her and the unfortunate tendency to punish herself with pain when she can't. In Mr. Grey she finds someone who will always appreciate her efforts to please him and who can change the punishment from a ritual of self-loathing to an erotic and pleasurable activity. Mr. Grey, meanwhile, is an intelligent man who is very anal about details and hates himself for using these two characteristics to imagine elaborate tortures to show his affection for the people he loves. In Lee he finds someone who enjoys his affections and really wants to know the side he has kept hidden from everyone.

If the ending is a little unrealistic -- Lee's public act of self-humiliation would probably ruin Mr. Grey's law practice in the conservative suburb they inhabit -- you can't blame a romantic comedy for concluding with melodrama. And don't make any mistake, this is definitely a romantic comedy, complete with the cliché of the woman in the wedding dress running to the one she actually loves in one final, desperate attempt to win his love. Except that in this movie her beloved orders her to stay perfectly still for three days and she ends up urinating in the wedding dress. That's not such a big difference, right?

The Vault - Choke

Choke (2008)
directed & written by Clark Gregg
based on a novel by Chuck Palaniuk
starring: Sam Rockwell, Anjelica Huston

At one point in the film Choke the hero, in search of an adventurous sexual experience, meets a stranger on a sex website similar to Adult Friend Finder who wants him to participate in a fantasy rape scenario. This young lady gives him a very particular script to follow -- what to do, what to say, how to disguise himself, how to threaten her with a very particular knife. She insists he "rape" her on a towel on the floor for fear of staining the bedsheets. She threatens him with legal consequences if he deviates from the script. She breaks character mid-scene to criticize his performance, then rushes through everything and gets herself off with a vibrator, leaving her fantasy rapist to his own devices. The scene is a brilliant and hilarious commentary on the yawning gulf that sometimes exists between the sexual fantasy and reality. If only the rest of the movie were so good....

The film is based on a novel by Chuck Palaniuk. I haven't read the novel in question (nor do I intend to now) but I'm familiar enough with the author's work that his M.O. is pretty clear -- Palaniuk likes to create protagonists that are alienated from "normal" society because of a fundamentally different world view, then tell their story with as many plot twists as possible. This technique made him famous because his first novel, Fight Club, tapped into a primal truth, the frustration a lot of young men feel because modern society doesn't let them express their aggressive side anymore. He isn't always so lucky -- his protagonists since Tyler Durden have been crafted mainly for shock value. In Choke, Palaniuk's chock value comes from a sensationalized cast of "sex addicts."

To start out, there are some real problems with the whole concept of sex addiction -- scientists can't agree on a definition and a lot of them don't think it exists at all. There's a question of terminology to begin with: an addiction is usually a psychological need for an outside substance (drugs, alcohol) whereas the need to continuously and joylessly engage in sexual activity is more accurately called a compulson. So why not call sex addiction "sex compulsion"? Because addiction is such a loaded word in our society and the term is mostly used by people who like its unsavory sound. Say addiction to the average American and they imagine degererate junkies, gamblers, alcoholics, over-eaters... and fornicators. The concept of "sex addiction" has been widely popularized by conservative religious organizations that are happy to usher deeply repressed men into quack addiction support groups that reinforce their guilt over masturbating to porn twice weekly. Using the word addiction plays into sex-negative stereotypes.

Choke writer/director Clark Gregg definitely isn't trying to avoid stereotypes. Victor, the film's protagonist, comes out and tells us all the clichés are true at the beginning of the film. His support group includes the guy who masturbates fifteen times a day and the cheerleader who banged the whole football team. But even beyond filmmaker's clear desire to present compulsive sex in the most unrealistic light possible there's the fact that Victor isn't really a sex addict at all. He tells us he has sex every three days, which I think you'll agree is not an unusual amount. He only has casual sex and though he has multiple partners most seem to be people he knows from every day life, as opposed to anonymous encounters, and at least one is an ongoing arrangement. Finally, the sex itself isn't what's makes Victor unhappy -- what makes him unhappy is a deeply messed up relationship with his mother that prevents him from liking the people he fucks and vice versa.

So, to review, the film purposefully buys into a sensational and cliché image of sex "addiction" and then fails to even present that accurately. I'm kinda speechless. As for the rest of the film, the jokes aren't that funny and, much like the fantasy rape victim, the director rushes through the Palaniuk plot twists (TM) so that the viewer hardly feels surprised to learn Victor is a clone of Jesus, and that the doctor treating his mother is actually a mental patient. My recommendation: rent a different movie.

...or maybe just watch the fantasy rape!

The Vault - Milk & The Times of Harvey Milk

The Times of Harvey Milk (1984)
directed by Rob Epstein
starring: Harvey Milk, James Fierstein

Winner of the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature in 1985, The Times of Harvey Milk uses archival footage and interviews to reconstruct the political career of the first openly gay elected official in the United States. The film briefly details Harvey Milk's campaign, his eleven month stint as a City Supervisor in San Francisco representing the new gay neighborhood in the Castro, his fight against Proposition 6 (a California ballot initiative that would have made it possible to fire all gay teachers and anyone who supported them) which gave Milk statewide and even national prominence, and his assassination by one of his colleagues, Supervisor Dan White, who also assassinated Mayor George Moscone. The final twenty minutes of the film follow White's trial, where his lawyer successfully convinced the jury that a combination of financial stress, family trouble and junk food caused White to become temporarily insane -- a travesty of justice that became known as "the Twinkie defense." White was convicted of manslaughter and served only six years in prison. He was released in 1984, the same year as the film (and committed suicide three years later, though that's not in the documentary).

On its artistic merits alone The Times of Harvey Milk is a pretty standard documentary: archival footage and audio supporting interviews with several of Harvey Milk's friends and political allies, all stitched together by James Fierstein's narration. But the filmmakers have done the one thing that every documentarian hopes to do -- they've found a story that is both fascinating on a human level and relevant in a larger social context.


Milk (2008)
directed by Gus Van Sant
written by Dustin Lance Black
starring: Sean Penn, Emile Hirsch, Josh Brolin, Diego Luna, James Franco

So, with such a wonderful, critically acclaimed documentary in fairly wide distribution, did director Gus Van Sant (My Own Private Idaho, Good Will Hunting, Elephant) need to give Harvey Milk the Hollywood treatment? Yes, I think he did. As we watched Sean Penn (as Milk) and his minions fight against Proposition 6, I doubt anyone in the audience could keep themselves from thinking of the recent battle against Prop. 8. That's a sure sign that the story of Harvey Milk needed to be told again, after 22 years. Sean Penn's performance is superb. Penn has clearly spent quite a bit of time looking at old video to get Harvey's mannerisms and voice right, but he gives his version of Milk something more than I saw in the documentary: a quiet vulnerability. Penn's Milk is fiercely determined, yes, but he's also a man who wears his heart on his sleeve no matter how much the birds peck at it. This touching performance rescues the film on the rare occasions when Van Sant and screenwriter Dustin Lance Black lay it on a little too strong -- such as the midnight phone call from the handicapped, suicidal gay teen or the attempt to turn Harvey's relationship with an ex (James Franco) into a romantic through-line even though it wants to be a close friendship.

Van Sant and Black aren't just trying to recreate the documentary with actors and that's what ultimately makes Milk a success. They use the historical events and a lot of the archival footage from the documentary as the skeleton of their film but then spend most of their time focusing on Milk himself. We see Milk as a Wall Street broker decide to come out of the closet and move to San Francisco. We see his humble entry into politics in the Castro, his three failed election campaigns, the suicide of someone close to him, and his role as a mentor to future AIDS activist Cleve Jones. The film also explores the motivations of Dan White in a way the documentary couldn't. Since we can only speculate about why he did what he did, the documentary could only follow the trial. Milk can show a fictional White (Josh Brolin) becoming more and more erratic, rejecting Harvey's attempts at friendship, and eventually surrendering to some personal demons which may, the film suggests without insisting, have included his own secret homosexuality.

Sean Penn's performance and Gus Van Sant's light touch make Milk one of the rare biopics that can actually stand on it's own as a good movie. But the experience of watching it will be vastly improved if you see The Times of Harvey Milk as well, and since the documentary is available for free at Hulu.com you really have no excuse not to, even if it isn't carried in your neighborhood Blockbuster.

The Vault - Sex: The Annabel Chong Story

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The Vault - The Education of Shelby Knox

The Education of Shelby Knox (2005)
directed by Marion Lipschutz and Rose Rosenblatt
starring: Shelby Knox

Shelby Knox is a high school student in Lubbock, Texas, a community full of evangelical Christians whose approach to sex education for teens is summed up in one word: abstinence. The community also has one of the highest teen pregnancy rates in America. The film follows Shelby through her junior and senior years of high school. An Southern Baptist, Shelby has pledged in church to abstain from sex until marriage, but as part of the city's Youth Committee she makes it her mission to get the School Board to adopt a comprehensive sex education program. This struggle gets Shelby involved in an LGBT student group's lawsuit against the Lubbock school district.

Shelby is up against a lot. She lives in a town where teenagers believe most gay people die by the age of 30 and where a sex ed class teaches students they can catch an STI by shaking hands with an infected person who has masturbated. Questioning what she has always been taught about sexuality is clearly painful for Shelby, a very intelligent young woman and you empathize as her personal experience challenge her entire belief system. The truth is so clear to her that, as an optimistic and somewhat naïve young person, she is positive that simply pointing it out to her peers, her pastor and the School Board she will change the world. It's hard to watch how devastated she is when she learns it isn't that easy.

This documentary is the story of not only Shelby's coming of age but of the belated coming of age of her parents. This is where the film is at its strongest. Adults may be set in their ways, and their conservative town might reinforce their conservative beliefs, but parents with real family values like Mr. and Mrs. Knox love their children no matter what -- and their children's battles have a way of becoming their battles. So what if the School Board uses political pressure to scare off the Youth Committee leader, and the LGBT group loses its court case? Shelby's quest has clearly made at least two converts in Lubbock and that's a good start.