The L Word’s Season Four Grand Finale

I enjoyed this—the fourth—season of The L Word more than any since the first. Producer Ilene Chaiken has returned to form, allowing a pleasing lightness back into the show, and slowing down the race to caricature and stereotype the characters. The star-billed guest artists enhanced the season, and the plot stayed on the more realistic side of outlandish than it has for the last two years. Even Sunday night’s grand finale (see clips from this and other episodes at http://www.sho.com/site/lword/episodes.do) avoided cliffhanging flourishes, ending wistfully and ambiguously with just enough mystery to keep us anticipating the start of Season Five (since the show has been renewed).

The Season Four finale left our heroines in various states of relationship distress, disorder, and for the first time in a while, pleasure. Max, our transgender hero, showed up only to load a rented van for Bette’s sign-stealing caper, but for long enough to suggest that he’s hesitating to go through with his sex surgery. Max was estranged from the rest of the L Word women this season, spinning out his gender transition mostly at work, which offered the show a chance to address gender discrimination in employment. Max is ostracized when he reveals he’s transitioning, which he does to advocate for a woman at the office who’s being sexually harassed.

Once his boss and co-workers understand Max’s identity, though, they shun him, despite his obvious talents, and the woman he outed himself to protect winds up assigned a major account in his place. When it’s clear Max has to quit, instead of blowing up or speechifying (which the writers could have chosen for his final moment on the job), Max closes his laptop and makes his way around the conference table, shaking hands, thanking people individually, and telling them how much he learned from them. While this polite trans-mentsch says his good-byes, the smug straight people sit chagrined and a little ashamed at their own ignorance and bigotry.

Shane and her new lesbian mommy girlfriend Paige come out to Paige’s son so that they can start spending nights together instead of having sex in cars and other public places (as if there's really something wrong with that). Jared reacts badly, but Shane persuades him that they’ll all be a family and that Shane’s little brother Shay (their father clearly had little imagination where names were concerned) will come live with them, too. The “promise” works and the boy’s down with the plan. I worried, though, that Shane, the champion of promiscuity and non-monogamy, seemed to be promising a nuclear family as the answer to the boy’s homophobia (“I don’t want you to be a lez, too,” he whines to his mom). And in fact, we soon find Shane brushing her teeth in Paige’s bathroom and contemplating a house in the suburbs for them and their kids.

But to her credit, Chaiken (who wrote and directed the episode) intercuts a 1950s-style fantasy sequence through their interactions, representing in tinny, monochrome reds and blues Ossie and Harriet moments of Shane in middle-class suburban male drag and Paige in Leave it to Beaver dresses, both playing at the stereotypical gender and class roles of the era. The critical irony works, and allows for the possibility that the lesbians-with-kids-in-the-suburbs fantasy might sour in Season Five.

After all, we’ve seen Shane reject this domestic scenario before with Carmen, who seemed much less intent on chaining her to a conventional coupled life than Paige and Jared. And Paige emanates a suspicious fragrance; there’s something not quite right about her wholesale embrace of Sapphistry. Or perhaps I don’t trust the character because I’ve heard rumors that the actor playing her (Kristanna Loken) has bad-mouthed The L Word cast, calling them cliquish and cold.

How Paige and Shane’s relationship resolves remains to be seen, but if their sexual encounters are any indication, it doesn't look good. At first, The L Word was the one of the only mainstream representations of lesbian sex to get it even remotely right. But after the first season, the show’s erotic quotient nosedived and hasn’t recovered. Shane and Paige literally go through the motions; there’s no performance of heat, desire, or even love in their awkwardly choreographed, forced couplings. Katherine Moennig’s desperately thin body could be partly to blame; seeing her sharp, jutting bones click through her less than suave faux butch fumblings takes all the ardor out of the scene. Or maybe it’s just that Jennifer Beals and Laurel Holloman were better at faking lesbian sex. And now that Papi’s been defanged as the chart-busting Romeo, Shane bears the burden of the show’s sex, and she buckles under the weight.

In another nice, cynical touch, Helena and her gambling dominatrix boss/lover Catherine bet on whether Shane and Paige will be together in six months. Helena says they will; if she wins, she gets a million dollars and her freedom. If sleazy, filthy rich Catherine wins, Helena signs up for another year of luxuriously indentured sex and wagering. Helena takes the bet, but as Catherine goes off to play the tables, Helena urgently empties her safe into a pillow case. Who knows what this might mean, but it’d be nice to have Helena back in control of her own life and finances. Perhaps Holland Taylor will reappear next season as her once again benevolent mother and give Helena back her inheritance. Although this season humanized Helena significantly, it’s not exactly clear what function the character serves, and watching her run about in sneakers moving boxes and jumping to do Catherine's bidding seems way out of her original aristocratic character.

The finale leaves Jenny, the newly anointed, always irritating diva, literally out to sea--or up the river without a paddle, or whatever metaphor works to describe her literal and figurative situation . At the beach-side going away party for Tasha, who’s being reposted to Iraq, Jenny drags a little yellow raft out into the waves, planning on a float with her new dog, the Pomeranian Sounder (who replaces the shelter dog she bought to be put down by her nemesis’s veterinarian lover earlier in the season).

Somehow, Sounder misses the boat, and trots up to alert Shane that Jenny’s drifted out on the ocean. But since Shane can’t yet speak dog, Jenny sits alone, artfully arranged in the small raft as the sun comes up at the end of the episode. She’s been fired from writing the movie based on her thinly veiled tell-all, Lez Girls, and she’s alienated all her friends and collaborators with her headstrong vanity. This, The L Word tells us in no uncertain terms, is what happens to girls who go bad and turn on their community—they get stuck out on the water without sunscreen.

Devastated by Tasha’s pending return to Iraq, Alice resists going to her send off party until Dana returns from the grave to talk some sense into her. How nice to see Erin Daniels back on the show, even for that brief scene, which gets Alice to the party. But the scene also made me recall how sparkling the relationship between Alice and Dana (and Leisha Haley and Daniels) was before the producers sacrificed Dana to breast cancer. The actors' witty repartee and the open affection between the characters (and the performers) was one of the highlights of the show. Alice hasn’t had a relationship with anyone as appropriate as Dana yet. But she heads off to Tasha’s party, showing up on the beach like a white apparition as Tasha and two of her friends (of color, happily) head in from a walk.

Tasha’s presence this season has lent the show some welcomed racial diversity, but her status as a closeted Army officer strains credulity. It’s doubtful that someone of Tasha’s commitments would endure the L girls' vague liberalism, or their entrenched political ignorance and apathy. The rare political conversations the writers whip up sound false and trite. Politics do better on this show when they’re incidental, references or jokes made in passing, or when they’re grounded in situations (like Max’s work environment) and relationships (like Bette’s with Jodi, who’s deaf and played by Marlee Matlin) than they are delivered in well-meant but wooden, didactic dialogue. Sending Tasha back to Iraq seems a convenient way to dispense with a character who has no future in The L Word's trajectory.

Likewise, stripped of her Casanova-esque sexual randiness, the ubiquitous Papi has lost her way, and her future on The L Word. Her attachment to Kit, the one non-lesbian in the circle (now that Tina’s back in the fold), never made sense. After indulging herself with a couple of alcoholic and sexual benders, Kit goes back to the remorseful Angus and returns to her AA meetings, determined to straighten up (in every sense of the word). Papi hangs on to Kit's group like an appendix holds on to a colon, vestigial and useless. Her other friends of color, who played such good basketball earlier this season, and who seemed a more formidable, complex presence in this mostly white show, disappeared after an episode or two, leaving Papi and Tasha as the sole representatives of another community.

Papi’s down and dirty physicality and her refusal to make a commitment longer than a couple of hours offered a refreshing balance to the other characters’ self-serious searches for mates. But with both Shane and Papi domesticated this season, no one remains to round out the representation of choices for lesbian sexual expression. And if Papi and Tasha go, two woman of color characters could bite the dust.

Cybil Sheperd, who’s done a yeoman’s job with her guest role, finally finds her match when Bette introduces her to Joyce, the divorce lawyer who arbitrated Bette's break-up with Tina, played by the impeccably campy Jane Lynch. Phyllis wants to get a divorce from her disapproving husband (and hopefully from her intolerant daughter); when she meets Joyce, it’s love at first sight. They gambol off into the butch/femme sunset of independent, happy women in their late 50s. Sheperd’s presence, while sometimes ridiculous and always sentimental, nonetheless tried to address the sexuality and desire of older lesbians. When Phyllis visited The Planet earlier in the season, the scene clarified how few places exist in which older lesbians can go to meet other women and socialize, especially when they’re just coming out. Seeing Phyllis walk off happily with Joyce redeemed her with dignity as a bona fide lesbian, even if she was never (not for one minute) believable as the Chancellor of a major university.

The finale also returned to the slapstick humor of the basketball game by sending Alice and Shane on a caper with Bette to steal a sign to give to Jodi. The large, rusted, antique piece of signage that cryptically proclaims “17 Reasons Why” looms over an abandoned warehouse, and the glamour girls press into uncharacteristic action to retrieve it. The basketball scene and this caper take great pleasure in parodying the characters' indolent passivity by throwing them into physical situations for which they're obviously ill-equipped. In this one, Bette, Alice, and Shane clip barbed wires, climb fences, throw meat to distract guard dogs, fall through windows, climb rooftops, and disassemble iron-cast signage, all without breaking a nail. In their hapless determination, they resemble Lucy and Ethel playing at Ocean's Eleven.

(jenniolson writes in her blog on the Our Chart web site that the "17 Reasons Why" sign was a real architectural and emotional landmark in San Francisco's Mission District for many years, until it was dismantled inexplicably and replaced by an illegal billboard that looms over the lesbian neighborhood to this day. She writes, "Erected in 1935, the 17 Reasons Why sign was a terrific Depression era commercial advertising structure, which originally sported neon tubing and stood as a neighborhood landmark promoting the Redlicks Furniture Store." Check out her very interesting history of the sign and its current status at http://www.ourchart.com/node/56427. The one in the show was a facsimile made by The L Word props folks.)

This season recuperated Bette back into the fold, and even let her friends tease her for the first time. Although Bette’s lost none of her sophistication, and although she still seems older and wiser than her friends, the writers let other characters poke fun at her foibles. Jennifer Beals plays great deadpan, listening to Tina and Kit and the others as they tell her that she’s controlling, that she makes mistakes when she’s scared, and as they enumerate all the ways she misfires in a relationship. Bette in fact has lost Jodi to an art commission in upstate New York. Bette evinces a kind of cluelessness that makes her well-wrought and well-played character that much more endearing. When Bette shows up in a field New York in the last scene driving a tractor towing the reassembled “17 Reasons Why” sign behind her toward the outdoor artwork Jodi's musing over, the moment is campy and sweet and does indeed win Jodi back.

This leaves Tina pining for Bette in the season’s wistful final moment. After all the vituperative recriminations of Season Three, Tina and Bette pulled together in Season Four to raise the rarely seen Angelika and to renew their friendship, if not their partnership. Sexual tension resurfaces between them, but Tina feels most caught by her resurgence of love and longing. Despite the ardor of Kate (played by the tough, sexy Annabella Sciorra), the director she’s hired to shoot the film adaptation of Jenny’s book, Tina’s stuck on Bette, feeding her lines like Cyrano so that she can win back Jodi’s affections. When Bette asks Tina for lines to deliver to Jodi, Tina tells her to say that she loves her and that she’d do anything for a second chance, which we know, as in Cyrano, is exactly what Tina wants to say to Bette. They misread each other’s cues and go off searching for their next relationship, when the woman they should be with is the one they both already lost.

Even the musical score improved this season, remanding Betty’s atrocious theme song to the opening credits and selecting popular singers with poignant lyrics to underscore the show’s moods. Toshi Reagon guest starred in the last episode, with her booming, plangent voice and affecting guitar providing the background for Tasha’s beach-side going away party. Finishing the season without the overwrought pyrotechnics of Bette driving off into the dark with her co-parented daughter in the back seat of her car was a welcome relief. The season ended as it ran, on a wistful, warm, funny, sweet, and human note.

And so it goes for the L girls of Vancouver (sorry, LA). Although I don’t think I’ll ever again feel the desperate sense of loss I experienced at the end of the first season, knowing the story wouldn’t continue for another nine months, I find myself ready to buy the fourth season DVD and to wait, distracted but eager, for the start of the fifth.

Sated, sapphically,
The Feminist Spectator

I Think I Love My Wife

Chris Rock’s just released comedy, I Think I Love My Wife, stars Rock as Richard Cooper, an upper-middle class investment banker whose seven-year, now sex-less marriage to an elementary school teacher bores him silly. Based on French New Wave director Eric Rohmer’s Chloe in the Afternoon, Rock’s adaptation turns in a slight comedy that documents Cooper’s slide in and out of sexual temptation. Life and sex options present themselves in the lovely countenance and luscious body of “old friend” Nikki Tru, played by the inestimable Kerry Washington (who deserves much better material, although she manages to wrangle a solid and smart—not just sexy—performance from what Rock, who wrote and directed the film, hands her here).

I Think . . . offers some promising social observations about race and class, but fails dismally to think in intelligent, progressive ways about gender and sexuality. Narrated by Rock’s Richard Cooper, the film winks and nods at the audience from the start, as he introduces what looks like his perfect family (a beautiful, professional wife, played by Gina Torres, two adorable children, one girl, one boy, a crisply landscaped and stately Westchester house, and all the other accoutrements that come with the paycheck of a Wall Street drudge). But when the camera first pulls back to frame Cooper leaving his domestic habitat for the Metro North train into the city, he looks out at the audience with bemused dismay, his image captioned “bored.”

These interjections of pointed (or to be more precise, pointing) editorial comments try to raise the level of this comedy to social satire, but it remains tethered to frat boy sexual humor infused with a strangely sad poignancy about the inevitability of assuming the stifling trappings of adulthood. The film makes it obvious that Richard is unhappy in his ritzy neighborhood (he’s the only person of color waiting for the train each morning), and dissatisfied with his high-powered job (where he knows by name the other people of color who work in his firm, one of whom is a cleaning woman and the other, a janitor) for reasons that have a lot to do with the singularity of his race in these resolutely white settings. But at the same time, the narrative insists, evidence to the contrary, that Richard’s problems really stem from his wife’s refusal to have sex. What the film intimates is a social problem it too quickly lets slide into a privatized, personal problem. His wife Brenda has become more interested in draperies than in his penis, leaving Richard to fantasize about women he sees on the train and on the streets of Manhattan.

At the banking firm where he toils, primly monitored by two white middle-aged female secretaries and George, a white middle-aged male colleague/friend (played by a wry and dissolute Steve Buscemi), Richard feels like a token but molds himself to the demands of his place in the firm. He wears sleek, expensive suits with silk ties, and holds himself like he’s born to the pedigree boasted by his prominently displayed degree from Columbia. The film gives nary a hint of his backstory, until Nikki Tru reappears in his life after an eight-year hiatus to catapult Richard back into a moment before the sober responsibilities of bread-winning and fathering and domestic husbandry descended to ruin his fun.

Nikki was Richard’s friend Nelson’s girlfriend. When she left Nelson, he tried to kill himself. We meet the poor schlub later in the film, and note that the bespectacled, straight-laced guy who reeks of “mama’s boy” is still pathologically hung up on his old girlfriend. This is the power of the Tru siren song; her galvanizing sexuality and intemperate spirit of adventure makes these men feel young and powerful. She good-naturedly hounds Richard at his office, raising the eyebrows of his morals-policing secretaries and even sympathetic George, who runs his own game of sexual infidelity with office temps. But George doesn’t take it seriously and no one seems to judge him for his indiscretions, as they do Richard. George keeps Viagra in his car's glove compartment, and can have sex with an array of women then go home at night to kiss his wife without compunction. Richard, on the other hand, has “feelings,” George tells him sadly, which makes it difficult to be an adept adulterer.

Indeed, the story tugs Richard’s feelings every which way as it proceeds to its inevitable conclusion. He loves his kids, scrambling across the floor to play with his daughter, but Nikki’s attentions make him feel like a kid again. She takes him to a car show, where they sit in the front seat of a sporty Porsche and fantasize about owning it. They play driving simulators together, hysterical at their video crashes and careering turns. She shows him a neat game where they sit on the windowsill of his office and throw dollar bills out the window, watching hapless pedestrians race to scrape the cash off the sidewalk. They make race jokes together, critiquing instantly and empathically how racial differences play out in almost every interaction, from crowded elevators filled with buttoned-down white people to the scramble-for-the-money-game where obviously well-heeled white men grab the cash from homeless people of color.

Nikki and Richard share a sense of their own outsiderness, not for how it oppresses them, but for how their analysis empowers them to be aware of moving through a world in which they know race matters. Brenda, on the other hand, makes Richard spell “white” and “black” in front of their daughter, hiding from her some truth about race that Nikki, loyal to her name, stands by with a rather appealing critical knowingness. Nikki won’t assimilate; Brenda accepts it as her rightful destiny.

While this narrative thread would make a smart, perceptive indie film, I Think I Love My Wife reneges on its promise and harnesses its story to the sexual possibility Nikki dangles in front of Richard with every move. She needs him to recommend her for a hostessing job at a restaurant, and to help her break up with a homicidal boyfriend, but she also needs his attention and his desire as evidence of her own power and agency. He resists the urge to have sex with her, but his longing for the unfettered, youthful possibility she represents in his life is nearly as distracting.

Brenda suspects something’s wrong and accuses Richard of infidelities he hasn’t, technically, committed. But when he comes home late, his clothes awry, and his excuses lame, she speaks to him like a child and he shrivels under her disapproval. Brenda isn’t his wife, she’s his mother, a withholding nag who reminds him of his domestic duties without giving him the sex he thinks is his married due. She emasculates him, while Nikki pumps him up to feel virile and heroic.

Richard joins Nikki in an unexpected, disastrous (and narratively unnecessary) trip to DC to cut her ties with her ex, which gets Richard beat senseless and nearly causes him to lose his job when their return flight is delayed and he misses a meeting. Brenda is apoplectic, so his marriage, too, nearly ends. This push to the brink snaps Richard out of his infatuated fantasy. He stops taking Nikki’s calls and hurries back into the family fold in a montage of scenes shot like Kodak moments ,with his wife and his children and Santa and the Easter Bunny and various other moms and dads (all white) singing “The Itsy Bitsy Spider” in nursery school classrooms while sitting in circles on the floor. Although the film wants to tell us that this is his proper milieu, you can’t help feeling Rock/Richard’s helpless acquiescence to this utter superficiality.

When Nikki reappears months later, suddenly professionalized and polished, sophisticated and mature, to visit Richard at his office wearing a lovely cream linen suit instead of a silken fire engine red cocktail dress, she’s found herself her own man. She’s decided that she isn’t getting any younger and should embrace the married-with-children destiny that descends on these characters with grim inevitability. Nikki doesn’t love the man she intends to marry; she just realizes that she’s 32, not 22, and that her sex appeal is already fading (another of the film’s more unbelievable assertions).

Nikki invites Richard to her place ostensibly for one last goodbye but actually to consummate their flirtation before they settle into their boring “normal” lives. After some barely convincing indecision, he slips off his wedding ring and follows her directions to her home. But even though Nikki’s tarted up in the lacy, barely-there underwear we know Richard loves, and even though she wears skyscraping catch me/fuck me heels that she hints she’ll keep on in bed, and even though Richard approaches his mission with appropriate zeal, when push comes to shove, he can’t follow through. Stripping off his tie, he catches himself in a mirror in Nikki’s bedroom and, in one of the film’s more odious substitutions, realizes that he’s a father, not an adulterer, and stops himself from going through with the act that will, according to the film’s logic, threaten everything. While Nikki languishes nearly naked on her bed, calling out to Richard not to go, he literally runs home to his wife. They resolve years of marital discord in a matter of moments with wailing musical accompaniment and theatrical lip-syncing to lyrics meant, I presume, to underline and satirize the high drama of the moment. Richard and Brenda promise to be close to each other, to have sex with each other, and to live together happily every after.

So, of course, Richard loves his wife. But what a sad state of affairs when marriage is painted as an obligation for men and women, when men are infantilized by their wives, when women are represented as mothers or whores, when African Americans are secluded in white enclaves and call it success, when people compromise vitality for deadening conformity, when being like everyone else, regardless of your race and your gender, is more important than your own aspirations. Can’t a pretty smart comedian make a movie that commits to a social critique instead of pretending nothing’s wrong with this picture? Can’t Rock imagine instead how to buck a system that whitewashes difference and squanders our talents, our desire, and our knowledge of how corrupt it is to want what the (white) Jones’s have?

Perplexed,
The Feminist Spectator

Women Playwrights Foiled Again, Still . . . What About "The Scene"?

There’s been a great deal of internet chat lately on the American Society for Theatre Research listserve, ASTR-L, about a brief piece called “Women’s Voices Missing from the Theatre: Does Anyone Care?” published online by the Women’s Media Center (see www.womensmediacenter.com/ex/020707.html). Writer Melissa Silverstein, reporting for the Center, suggests that because so many famous women actors are appearing on Broadway right now, and because some of the top grossing musicals tell women’s stories (she lists The Color Purple, Grey Gardens, and Wicked), “you might think women in theatre are doing great these days.” But she goes on to note that appearances to the contrary, women are “struggling for parity with their male colleagues.” Despite the fact that women comprise over half of the Broadway theatre-going audience, plays by women are frequently ignored by producers, and women playwrights continue to toil in the largely invisible world of workshop productions, waiting to be noticed and taken seriously.

Silverstein refers to a landmark report sponsored by the New York State Council on the Arts in January 2002, co-written by Susan Jonas and Suzanne Bennett. Jonas has long been a staff associate for NYSCA (although she’s currently on leave), and Bennett was, until recently, the Associate Artistic Director of the Women’s Project and Productions, whose artistic director was still, then, founder Julia Miles. (The report can be accessed at http://www.womenarts.org/advocacy/WomenCountNYSCAReport.htm; it’s housed here with the Fund for Women Artists, an important advocacy group for women in theatre and other arts.) Sadly, little seems to have changed in the five years since that important study was distributed and discussed. Plays by women are still considered risky propositions for the most heavily capitalized Broadway productions, and regional theatres too often follow suit, playing the money card when they opt out of plays by women. There remain relatively few Pulitzer Prize winners in Drama who are women: Marsha Norma, Beth Henley, Wendy Wasserstein, Paula Vogel, and Suzan-Lori Parks pretty much round out the contemporary ranks.

What we can do about this sad and very static state of affairs? How can we prevent the next generation of arts writers from being required to make the same observations about the disempowerment of women playwrights as their predecessors? Silverstein’s comments really only echo those made by critics and scholars for the last at least 30 years. Why is there no movement toward equity in Broadway theatre?

The evidence seems to point to economics. Silverstein says that “In interviews with artistic directors for the NYSCA report, Susan Jonas noted that a common theme was, ‘Plays by women have limited interest and we’ll lose money on them.’” But this is the same lame excuse producers have offered for years. Many straight plays fail to recover their investments on Broadway; producing any homegrown American play (rather than a pre-approved British transfer) is, however shamefully, an economic gamble for the committed capitalists running theatres in Times Square. But that doesn’t explain why so many more plays by American men are given the chance to fail on Broadway.

Silverstein mentions that the new Theresa Rebeck play, The Scene, seems poised for a Broadway transfer, although her play Bad Dates was mentioned for the same move several years ago and never made it. Unfortunately, The Scene is a complicated example for this conversation, because although the play might have received some (though not universally) good reviews, its representations of women are so appallingly limited, I think it’d be a very good thing if fewer instead of more people saw the play. But before I discuss The Scene, which is currently playing at Second Stage on 43rd St., it’s worth pointing out that another Second Stage-produced straight play, The Little Dog Laughed, by Douglas Carter Beane, easily moved from 43rd Street to the Cort Theatre on Broadway after Ben Brantley gave it a glowing review in the Times.

Having seen both productions, I honestly can’t see why Rebeck’s play shouldn’t transfer, since it’s cut from the same cynical, ironic, sadly hopeless perspective on human endeavor as Beane’s. In Little Dog Laughed, the four characters—two closeted gay men, one young artsy woman, and one older, conniving and striving woman—have at each other while trying to navigate the shark-infested waters of Hollywood stardom. One of the men (played by Neal Huff) is a closeted famous actor. When he engages the services of a rent-boy (Johnny Galecki) for an evening, the two improbably find themselves drawn to each other and begin a relationship that threatens the male star’s public stature.

Their assignations and glimmering hopes for a relationship are micro-managed by the star’s slimy, powerful agent (played by the indomitable Julie White) who, although she’s supposed to be a lesbian herself, becomes the mouthpiece for virulent homophobia that courses barely disguised under the play’s paper-thin surface. She can’t condone their relationship, because the star’s reputation would falter and the gravy train he provides for her would end. So she engineers a plan that puts the rent-boy on the road—with millions of dollars in his pocket—toward a new life, just to get him out of the picture, and arranges for the star to conveniently marry and raise a child with the rent-boy’s old girlfriend (a thankless role played by Zoe Lister-Jones).

When I saw the play at Second Stage last year, I was appalled by how callously these proceedings transpired, all marked by the supposedly witty, empty banter that contemporary comic playwrights seem to think human conversation sounds like. The men can barely string together sentences; they’re represented as handsome naifs with a powerful physical attraction but not enough balls to follow their desire to any sort of jeopardizing commitment. The rent-boy, because he’s less powerful and monied, is allowed more emotion than the star, who’s already soul-dead from his shallow image-making. That the rent-boy is happy to take the money and run, though, compromises any emotional potential he might have as a character, while his girlfriend and the star are happy to be hooked in a relationship with no substance but great public interest.

Pulling all these strings is the uber-agent, the rail-thin, ball-busting verbal gymnast who can crush an ego with an adjective and has no apparent life besides trying to ply her star’s trade. She has no emotion but irony and receives very little human contact in the course of the play (air kisses don’t count). For this role, Julie White got rave reviews.

I couldn’t figure out what people saw in Little Dog Laughed. Reading the promos, I anticipated a sharp critique of Hollywood hypocrisy, and a satiric inquiry into the costs of fame, all delivered with sparkling dialogue and witty repartee. No such luck. The talk is mean-spirited and superficial, the plot is driven only by fear of sexual exposure, without a thought for what might be lost in the process of hiding a person’s truth. Scott Ellis’s direction boasted a fair amount of man-on-man action, all tastefully cloaked in bed sheets and arranged so that body parts we discreetly hidden as their simulations played out. The men in the play are boorish bores; the women either cutthroat or common. But maybe that’s the point; nothing in this play challenges anyone’s conceptions of the world as it is and certainly not men and women as they are. The play’s queer politics are anathema, and its gender politics retrograde. Maybe that’s why it moved to Broadway.

Little Dog Laughed, perhaps thankfully, didn’t last that long at the Cort Theatre, and maybe that’s why Second Stage isn’t rushing to move The Scene, along with the added burden of its playwright’s gender. But The Scene has much in common with the earlier comedy. This, too, is a two man/two woman play; this one, too, is beautifully produced, with sets that fly in fully dressed or roll in from the wings decorated with the comfortable accoutrements of upper-middle class life. The Scene's production design is elegant and efficient; much money was no doubt spent to make the condo terrace and the two New York apartment settings in which the action unfolds. The actors are top-drawer, including Tony Shaloub (of the hit cable series Monk but also late of many very fine independent films like Big Night) as Charlie, the middle-aged fading television star (again); Christopher Evan Welch as his best friend, Lewis; Patricia Heaton (of Everybody Loves Raymond fame) as Charlie’s wife, Stella; and Anna Camp as Clea, the newly arrived from Ohio New Yorker who plays dumb but proves a wily adversary on these people’s common march toward their own blind ambitions.

Here again, despite its female origins, the gender politics are appalling. Clea first appears to be a quintessential bimbo, the cute young blond thing whom Charlie and especially Lewis ogle on the terrace outside their friend’s party. Charlie at first finds Clea’s Valley Girl inflections and her dim wit despicable, and mocks her rather cruelly. But when Lewis invites Clea to his apartment for a date, Clea’s interest in Charlie’s prior and potentially future fame seduces him into a full-blown, sexually charged affair, which they conduct literally under Stella’s nose. Of course, it helps that Stella supports Charlie by working a powerful media producer’s job while he’s unemployed. This gives him leave, in the second act, to justify his affair with Clea, when she finds them having sex in their apartment, complaining that Stella is just “too competent.” Throughout the play, Stella is accused of being a “frigid Nazi,” overly invested in keeping her desk at right angles and otherwise conducting her life reasonably. Her frigidity is underlined by her refusal to bend to Charlie’s physical administrations early in the play, and by the fact that her infertility requires her to adopt a baby from China. She epitomizes the castrating woman, long a staple of the white American male playwright’s canon. But is this all we can expect from a woman playwright?

Likewise, Clea is the stereotypical whore (without the heart of gold), a brainless, conniving trick of surfaces looking for a ride to power by lying on her back with her legs spread (a position she assumes, literally, countless times in this production, directed by Rebecca Taichman, who also directed lesbian performer Peggy Shaw’s Menopausal Gentleman). Clea dresses in pretentious, clinging black, has a tiny waist, bounteous blond locks, and not a shred of empathy for anyone she meets. That someone who at first appears as sane as Lewis would lust after her, and that someone who at first appears as sophisticated as Charlie would fall for her reveals the sick heart at the play’s center. Only Stella sees through Clea immediately, refusing to give her a job with her company and setting off the spiral of events that finally unravels her marriage, ends Charlie’s friendship with Lewis, and nails the coffin of Charlie’s career. But because the women view each other as mortal enemies, no sense of understanding is possible between them. In fact, Clea laughs with brutal delight when Stella walks in on her and Charlie having sex, a cruel, morally bereft moment that only underlines the lack of gendered kinship in this female-authored play.

Perhaps Rebeck means The Scene as a satire of corrupt Hollywood mores; she’s written plays on this topic several times, with a vengeance apparently derived from her own years as a television writer (for NYPD Blue, among other shows). But either Taichman’s direction lost the parodic focus, or it wasn’t never there at all. The play ends where it began, with a light disquisition on the “surrealism” of the terrace setting and, by extension, the unreality of the much rearranged situation of relationships, privilege, and power in which the characters finally end. But as comic social commentary, The Scene lacks weight or substance and ends as a hateful, misogynist evening at a wealthy theatre that’s lavishing money and time on work whose existence begs its own question.

This is not the kind of work by women playwrights for which I want to advocate. But it’s the kind of work I’m afraid will transfer to Broadway, following on the heels of The Little Dog Laughed, its gay male-written counterpart. I’m as keen for comedy as the next spectator, but not for work whose cynicism provides pat answers for a social malaise it can’t even diagnose, let alone engage in any potentially productive way. If this is the material that’s going to “make it,” failure sounds like a more progressive option. In fact, maybe women’s absence from Broadway theatres isn’t such a bad thing after all, if the bulk of what’s offered there panders to some low common denominator of what white middle class straight men find fun, or how they like to imagine the moral bankruptcy of women and queer men. If that’s so, who needs it?

I loved a local, Austin production I saw of Rebeck’s play, Omnium Gatherum, and I’ve long followed her work, as she’s one of the few women, besides the late Wendy Wasserstein, writing what I more often find rather incisive comedy. The problem is not the "popular"; that is, I don't think Broadway as a venue is necessarily, always politically conservative. But although accusations of “selling out” seem retrograde and, in fact, much too simplistic and not very useful, I do wonder that her increasing success is leading Rebeck to narrow, instead of expand, her portrayals of women.

Just as a footnote, here are some women playwrights whose work I admire that I’d much rather see on Broadway, or even given a sumptuous production of the sort that The Scene received here: Naomi Wallace, Kia Corthron, Dael Orlandersmith, Irene Fornes, Alice Tuan, Naomi Iizuka, Diana Son, Lisa Loomer, Paula Vogel, Lisa D’Amour, and Heather McDonald, among more whom I’ll name, and hopefully write about, in the future.

The Feminist Spectator

The L Word Plays on

[Note: For those of you who’ve never seen The L Word, or for those of you who are inveterate fans, the essay I wrote during the show’s earlier seasons might be useful. Here’s the cite: “Fans of Lesbians on TV: The L Word’s Generations,” Flow http://www.flowtv.org/, http://idg.communication.utexas.edu/flow/, posted April 29, 2005.]

Season four of The L Word is settling into its rather campy groove, dispensing with the histrionics of last season with dispatch and throwing our lesbian heroines into the latest melodramatic and comic plot twists. The putrid theme song by the female rock group Betty sets the tone, with its one word adjectives and trying-to-be-sexy verbs that pretend to describe the whole of lesbian “lives and loves.” But somehow, that entirely superficial, tuneless list song sums up what the show is all about.

In this season, Bette (Jennifer Beals), who was summarily fired from the museum where her terrific Provocations exhibit caused such a stir in the show’s inaugural year, has miraculously become a dean at California University, a fictitious (in more ways than one) institution of higher education where Bette’s immediate superior is Vice Chancellor Phyllis, played by guest star Cybill Shepherd. Even though this story line is among the show’s most unbelievable, the position returns Bette to the work place, where she demonstrates strength of character and balances out the other L women’s propensity to lounge about gossiping. Bette’s authority in the workplace influences her status with her friends, giving her pride of place as the L girls’ look-to friend/role model.

The other women seem younger than Bette. They work at jobs that allow them simply to exaggerate their social selves, Shane as a hairdresser at a punky skate boarders’ boutique, Alice on her tell-all, chart-drawing radio show, Tina as a studio executive who never appears to do anything, and the now penniless Helena as a caterer. Helena’s new skill represents another of season four’s miracles. Just a few episodes ago, Helena—the scion whose access to her inheritance was abruptly terminated by her art philanthropist mother—seemed unable to even juggle the phones at Shane’s salon. Now, she’s managing to produce caviar blinis at a moment’s notice for chic guests at the Vice Chancellor’s fundraiser.

Bette’s work, when she has it, has always lent The L Word its gravitas, its one intellectual and often political strain. This season promises not to disappoint, since Bette has already demonstrated her authority in the classroom, as well as her facility with odious, conservative fundraisers. When Bette tours one of those potential donors through the studio of the university’s artist-in-residence, Jodi (played by Marlee Maitlin), refuses to bow to Bette’s pressure to censor one of her students’ most provocative pieces during the visit. Maitlin’s character neatly points out Bette’s new hypocrisy; she who once spoke eloquently of the need for her museum to display art that crosses lines of social propriety is now putting her pretty words to use in the service of the dollar. Jodi lets Bette know in no uncertain terms that that just won’t do. This brief contretemps has lent the show a whiff of its former at least casually progressive politics, which have been sorely missing in recent seasons.

Last Sunday’s episode (Episode 5, “Lez Girls,” February 4th, 2007) offered the most unadulterated, adult sexual tension I’ve seen on the show in a long time. At the Vice Chancellor’s fundraiser—the one Helena caters and Bette should be working—sculptor Jodi and her ASL interpreter cajole Bette into stepping out with them into the yard to smoke a joint. Maitlin and Beals catch a vibe of genuine pleasure in each other’s company; their flirtation is sexy and fun, even with the intervening presence of the queer interpreter, who adds an element of both prurience and frisson to the seduction. Jodi is in the middle of blowing pot smoke into Bette’s ready and willing mouth (in a moment shot in romantic silhouette), when Alice and Phyllis burst into the yard fighting, requiring Jodi and Bette to postpone the moment (and to make us wait for its consummation, no doubt, in the next episode).

Cybill Shepherd has been amusing but disappointing as Phyllis, the newly Sapphic administrator. Her silly performance of a character whose authority is virtually nil unfortunately counterbalances Bette’s newly rediscovered seriousness. Where Bette/Beals is almost convincing delivering her art history lectures and explaining modern art to donors, Shepherd’s administrator never seems to do any work, and carries herself like a floozy instead of a professional. She’s constantly popping up to waylay Bette in the university’s halls, and spends way too much office time confessing her long-repressed attraction to women. Her affair with the ever willing Alice is way over the top, a romp of unbridled lust and experimentation that even Alice begins to find too much.

Shepherd’s portrait is too sincere to be campy, and although she’s clearly trying hard to fit into the scene (as a character and as an actor), she’s coming close to embarrassing herself. Too bad she can’t use what used to be her sultry sexuality, the much more indolent, subtle flirtatiousness that she demonstrated so skillfully with Bruce Willis back on Moonlighting, to give Phyllis’s new presence in the girl gang more nuance and texture. Instead, Shepherd seems hampered by her age and her weight, looking like a rather puffed up version of her younger self, a woman—perhaps just like Phyllis, her character—alienated from her body and forced to play the role from her neck up, even though she’s acting at desire that should emanate from much lower. Although Shepherd seems game for the sexual experimentation she’s portraying in the show, something about her eager puppy dog countenance trivializes what it means for a middle-aged professional woman with a husband and two college-age kids to choose to come out.

Other characters seem to be settling into a deeper sense of themselves this season. Alice has always been the show’s comic relief, in part because she’s written as lighter and less serious than the others, and partly because Leisha Haley is the most skilled at the wry comic turns the best The L Word writers offer. At the same time, Alice commands a larger range of emotions, again because Haley (along with Beals), is one of the show’s more accomplished performers. Granted, much of the time, the actors aren’t given a lot to work with. The script is often shallow, the dialogue inane. But the rotating stable of writers occasionally turns out some more accomplished, sophisticated dialogue, and when it does, Beals and Haley make it work.

Alice’s insane obsession with Dana in season three, after Dana left her to return to the “soup-chef,” was Alice’s nadir as a character; her hope for reconciliation was completely unbelievable and tedious. But once Dana was diagnosed with breast cancer (a gratuitous, manipulative plot twist that killed off Erin Daniels, another of the show’s better actors), Alice settled back into the reasonable character she’d been, rising to the occasion of caring for her friend through her death. Season four rewards Alice’s long-suffering loyalty by letting her be sexual again, first with Papi, the hot new Latina counterpart to the anti-monogamous Shane (who Papi derisively calls “Vanilla”). Papi’s centered herself on Alice’s chart by claiming attachments to over 1,500 women. When Alice investigates, trying to locate this miraculous lover, she finally finds Papi parked outside a Latino bar in a stretch limousine, into which Alice happily climbs to do her hands-on research. When Papi drops Alice off at her house the next morning, Alice introduces her to Helena, who becomes Papi’s next conquest. Papi becomes, by sexual approximation, part of the girl gang’s group.

Tina seems to be having second thoughts about her retreat back into heterosexuality, as it’s clear her sensitive new man might be less enlightened about gender and sexual equality than he’d seemed. The lingering sexual tension between Bette and Tina is ramping up a notch or two, even as they continue their recriminations and bickering. After all, Bette’s baby-snatching (the implausible ending to season three) was quickly forgiven and forgotten, and their new co-parenting arrangement easily decided. Happily, their lives as parents haven’t taken focus, a rather refreshing development, considering that these are, after all, wealthy lesbians who worked hard to have their child. Angus and Kit, in fact, are seen with their baby, Angelika, more often, since Angus continues to work as Bette and Tina’s “manny.”

Jenny’s true colors are flying this season, as producer Ilene Chaiken is apparently giving in to fans’ longtime dislike of her character. Her book was published to mediocre reviews, but Jenny’s become less of a maudlin, self-involved artist and more of a snotty, ego-centric writer, wreaking pathetic, Fatal Attraction-esque revenge on a reviewer for Curve Magazine who panned her book. Jenny also offends Alice by insisting that a story she wrote for The New Yorker (as if) is fiction rather than thinly veiled truth about her friends. The sniveling self-mutilator with strange fantasies and enigmatic flashbacks has found her evil stride as an arrogant, self-important cultural avatar, and the show’s writers seem to delight in just letting Jenny be bad.

Meanwhile, her ex, Max, is settling into his would-be manhood. After being cruelly rejected by his boss’s daughter when he reveals that he’s in the middle of a gender transition (she spits at Max, “I don’t date freaks”), Max prepares to lose his job, only to find that the politically and emotionally limited women’s studies major and would-be feminist he was dating has not, in fact, exposed his secret to her father. Max has moved up and down the meter of likable, sympathetic character-dom, but he seems to be evening out into a rather quiet, even tame masculinity. (Although still, it’s a white masculinity that secures ever more surely his privilege and his entrée into a powerful male world.)

Episode Five’s opening moment reveals Max gazing in the mirror at his very female body, removing his shorts and his dildo to stare frankly at his breasts and his penis-less bush. The moment is emotionally cryptic; it’s not clear what Max is thinking, whether he’s disgusted with his femaleness or coming to terms with its presence. While the moment seemed rather brave and almost moving, it was staged as a reflection out of time and out of context, shot against a floating black backdrop. Whatever Max felt about his looking was never clarified or revisited.

If Daniela Sea were a more expressive actor, the moment might have revealed more, and built a sense of depth into a character who’s seemed, until recently, something of a sap to viewers who complained that the show was too unrepresentative of the “real” lesbian community (whatever that is). First, Max was Maura, Jenny’s butch working-class lesbian lover, upholding all the potential for “difference” (except racial and ethnic) in her one slight, awkward body. Maura didn’t fit in with Jenny’s friends because she wasn’t rich and superficial; instead, she was rough and tumble and “real” in the way that only a cable TV show can imagine working-class people to be, which means they have limited vocabularies and wear continually bemused expressions. Once Maura started taking testosterone and transforming into Max, though, the character quickly passed through a violent and hostile phase to find his calling as a computer wiz, rising quickly into the ranks of the middle class and finding potential succor as a straight white male. This recent unluckiness in love prompted the first opportunity for self-reflection Max has had since the character joined the show.

The funniest scene in all four seasons of The L Word has to be the basketball game Papi and her friends play against Alice and hers. The two groups (one predominantly white, with the exception of Bette and Kit, the other a mixed group of women of color) meet up on a public court in a scene staged like the rumble from West Side Story. Our heroines are clearly out-butched by the other women, but they do their best to rise to the occasion, flaunting their matching athletic wear and desperately clutching their Starbucks cups. Jenny is quickly undone when the ball knocks her cup from her hand, but the previously reluctant Bette feels her innate competitiveness take over. The game is called mid-way through when Shane’s brother breaks his arm skate-boarding, but as the women breathlessly leave the court, the ever high-achieving Bette suggests that they should practice for the next game.

The scene was one of the few in the show’s four-year history in which the writers seemed willing to poke cheerful, self-reflexive good fun at the characters, parodying in one sharply drawn scene the upper-middle-class fashionista fragility that makes them more comfortable in tony coffee shops than on public basketball courts. The satire is affectionate but pointed, the scene hilarious in its knowingness.

After four seasons with the L women, one of the things that strikes me most is the ongoing sense of community that deepens as their fictional lives proceed. For better or for worse, these women are family to each other, and their commitment to kinship continues to rewrite the codes of how our relationships might be defined. Narrative expediency keeps them moving among each other, in and out of sexual relationships, adding and discarding new love interests to and from the group, but the basic core of Bette, Tina, Jenny, Shane, Alice, and Kit remains strong and evolving. With the addition in the last two seasons of Helena and Max, the L gals continue to solidify and strengthen the force field in which they orbit together.

Although there seem to be fewer scenes this season at the Planet, the coffee shop/bar/performance space that Kit runs and where everyone hangs out, the women congregate in other places in other ways, always coming to each others’ rescue without question or complaint. When Shane’s little brother Shay runs away, they all drop their lives to go look for him. When Tina decides she needs to bring together her straight and lesbian worlds, they all suck it up and head to her party, at which the heterosexuals turn out to be a backward, retrograde bunch, soundly out-classed by Bette and company. Although you sometimes have to wonder how they’re able to free themselves up so quickly, the women are simply, clearly, there for each other.

The show’s approach to race currently seems sharper than it’s been since the first season, when Bette’s illicit affair with the African American carpenter set up a productive tension between her life with Tina and her white friends, and the entrée into a different racially identified community that the carpenter provided. In season four, with Papi and her multiracial friends coming round for basketball games and drinks in bars, and with Alice taking a shine to Papi’s mysterious, taciturn African American friend Tasha (played by Rose Rollins) and her motorcycle, the potential for exploring race as a more explicit dynamic among lesbians has, happily, returned. On the other hand, Janina Gavankar, as Papi, seems to be continuing the strange cross-race casting tradition that the woman playing Carmen began last season; if I’m reading her name correctly, Gavankar is of Southeast Asian ethnicity, rather than Latina. Why the producers can’t actually cast a Latina in a race-appropriate role is beyond me.

Who knows where Chaiken and her writers and directors will take us from here? The talent seems a cut above this season; the writing is for the most taut and wry, the characters seem to be growing into more complex, fully developed people, and the direction seems more creative, fast-paced, and less flat-footed than last season. For now, I’m having more fun watching The L Word than I’ve had in a long time. I’m finding it less embarrassing, more amusing, and even sometimes thought-provoking, which is all I need from a lesbian soap opera. For that, I’m delighted that it’s still on the air.

Watching happily,
The Feminist Spectator

Chatting About Gay People on "The View"

I’ve been spending some time in Pittsburgh (my hometown) with my mother recently, while she recuperates from major surgery. She’s been unable to read very much, so I’ve watched a lot of daytime television with her, seeing shows that I’ve only read about otherwise. For instance, The View, with Rosie O’Donnell, Barbara Walters, Joy Behar, and Elisabeth Hasselbeck, crossed my radar screen mostly when Rosie replaced the African American woman whose name escapes me, and its ratings and visibility began to grow from the controversy. The show was also impossible to ignore in the last month or so, when Rosie’s remarks about Donald Trump’s pardoning the latest Miss America’s peccadilloes caused a major contretemps in which other shows replayed O’Donnell’s and Trump’s ad hominem attacks ad nauseum through several news cycles. Trump called Rosie fat and crass; O’Donnell returned the favor by combing over her hair in a perfect imitation and impugning his morality.

But I’d never actually watched the show until this week, when my mother’s amused commitment to seeing it each day let me tune in (see http://abc.go.com/daytime/theview/). To my surprise, I’m impressed by what I’ve seen. Although I don’t watch television talk shows of any variety, this one strikes me as a refreshing alternative to the shouting matches staged by male pundits, from progressives like Bill Maher and Jon Stewart to rightwing talking heads like Rush Limbaugh and other cable shows with similar express-yourself-loudly-and-provocatively designs.

On The View, the women talk in a seemingly spontaneous, extemporaneous format, raising issues in the news about which to exchange their opinions and ideas. O’Donnell and Behar, as the resident comics, pepper the conversation with witty one-liners, but their well-timed, sharp and smart remarks are rarely extraneous, but always pointed observations about the foibles of politics and its personalities. In the past week, during the show’s first hour of free exchange (followed each day by two different interviews with personalities including, while I’ve watched, an Academy Award Best Supporting Actor nominee and a lead from a television series), I’ve heard the four women discuss the potential presidential candidacies of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama; the picture of Rudy Guiliani and his wife Judith, which ran on the cover of the New York Post the day before Guiliani announced his presidential candidacy (see http://www.nypost.com/seven/02062007/news/nationalnews/) the cross-country, deluded, lust-induced and allegedly murderous adventures of fallen astronaut Lisa Nowak; and various other current events.

I appreciated that they roamed from gossip to real politics, and that their expertise wasn't centralized in, say, domestic issues (as in issues of the home or so-called private life, which is historically assigned as women's realm). They were very clear about being "ordinary women" (although anyone on a tv show this visible can hardly, really be called "ordinary") with a simple right to voice their own opinions into a public forum. As such, they offered a great example to the women in the audience, as well as those watching at home, for how to participate in civic, as well as more mundane, conversations.

One of the things that’s most impressed me, though, is the frequency with which the co-hosts address gay issues in the news, or even simply think through the implications of the news from a gay and lesbian perspective. O’Donnell’s presence has something to do with this marked amount of airtime devoted to queer issues, but, as she said the other day when addressing the Snicker’s ad that aired during last Sunday’s Super Bowl, she doesn’t want to be the “go to person” for gay issues. Her co-hosts agreed, and ably took up responses to the controversial commercial themselves, addressing homophobia on television and how ridiculous the ad was to feed on men’s fears of same-sexuality.

One of today’s topics was the recently rehabilitated Rev. Ted Haggard, the former president of the National Association of Evangelicals, who resigned from his post after a gay prostitute with whom he’d had regular sexual liaisons exposed what the escort called Haggard’s “hypocrisy.” Haggard claims that after three weeks in rehab, he was convinced of his heterosexuality and that “Jesus is starting to put me back together” (quoted in The New York Times, 2/07/07, A11). All four co-hosts seemed dubious about Haggard’s disavowal of his gay sexual encounters and his magical return to full-fledged heterosex. Their suspicions led to a fairly sophisticated conversation about whether or not one can turn sexual preferences on and off.

O’Donnell set the tone by proposing that sexuality is a spectrum, that everyone experiences a mixture of sexual attractions over the course of a lifetime, that no one is as fully queer or straight as we often proclaim. To illustrate her point, she described the two-year relationship she had with a man when she was 28-years-old, and admitted that although she was happy in the relationship and fond of the man, she knew that something was missing and eventually pursued the lesbianism for which she’s become one of America’s most visible spokespeople. Joy Behar carried on the baton, insisting that discussions about sexual possibilities are parents’ responsibilities, that when it’s clear their kids are attracted otherwise, they should ask their kids straight out (if you will) whether or not they’re gay or lesbian, without worrying, as Rosie remarked wryly, that the very question might “turn” them queer.

While ordinarily, I’m wary of O’Donnell’s status as Ms. Lesbian USA, I was actually impressed and pleased by the nuanced discussions about gay identity she launched in this completely mainstream popular forum. For the Snickers ad debate, she referred frequently to GLAAD (the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, see http://www.glaad.org/) and their stand on stereotypical queer representations, shouting out to an important progressive LGBTQ non-profit that’s done good work protesting excessively insulting portrayals of queer people in the media and films. On Haggard, O’Donnell said it’s impossible to “pray the gay away.” Later in that show, when she described a party favor the show’s guests were invited to take home, she mistakenly said everyone would “gay” instead of “get” a gift certificate, which prompted Behar to remark that “every day is gay day here” on The View.

Where I expected a certain level of tension among the women about Rosie’s predominating lesbian presence, and over her insistence on being out (not to mention loud and proud), I found instead a kind of openness and camaraderie that was infectious and fairly politically liberal, given the show’s context and its audience. The studio spectators are panned quickly at the top of the hour, as in many talk shows, to secure the fact that they’re there, that their applause isn’t canned—although it’s impossible to know if they’re looking at signs telling them when to laugh or applaud—and that they’re “ordinary people” happy to be invited into the audience to watch the hosts talk. At a glance, the audience looks mostly white, middle-class, and middle-America, with a fair share of unfashionable haircuts and less than stylish, informal clothes.

In fact, to secure the presumptive class status of their audience in the studio and at home, The View (this week, at least) began the last few shows with the co-hosts modeling clothing from various low-end fashion outlets, like TJ Maxx. A resident clothing expert apparently chooses their outfits, then each of the four co-hosts walk in front of their common desk to model everything from their footwear to their accessories. Rosie invariably camps her modified runway moment, which calls ironic, playful attention to her hardly model-like shape.

This morning, as Barbara Walters modeled her TJ Maxx outfit, Rosie quipped about Walters’ more petite build, saying, “I was that size in seventh grade.” But the repartee among the women seems affectionate, even as their views are flung fast and firm into the stew of their conversation. The mod glass desk they sit behind is a marked improvement on the clichéd living room sets standard for many daytime, woman-hosted talk shows. The more professional look emulates, in some small way, the set for shows with more conventional (and more male) political pundits.

While the conversation on The View today was certainly LGBTQ studies 101, watching with my mother (who just turned 70, a short 20 years my senior), I felt a welter of emotions. I couldn’t help but feel how remarkable it was that four women of various ages and levels of fame or notoriety were having a conversation on day time network television in which they considered gay and lesbian sexuality positively (although “gay” was the word used exclusively during the conversation, never “lesbian” and never “queer”). When I came out to my parents in 1981, after coming out to myself and my friends in 1978, this kind of popular discourse about sexuality was rare or non-existent on tv.

In fact, I remember watching with my parents an episode of Medical Center—an early doctor show with Chad Everett that ran from 1969-1976—about an illicit lesbian relationship between a younger (victimized) and older (predatory) woman. I recall being painfully aware of their disgust and discomfort, of how easily they followed the cues Medical Center sprinkled liberally through the episode about how immoral and corrupt the women’s relationship was and how much the older woman deserved to be punished for her desire.

I remember trying to keep my cheeks from flushing with the identification and curiosity I felt, with the painful admixture of amazement that my own desire was being represented on television at all and the inevitable self-doubt (if not self-loathing) about how horrible this sisterhood into which I was bravely stepping seemed to be considered by society at large. When my parents knew about my sexuality, those inadvertent moments of watching television together when some gay topic or another came up were even worse, because none of us, including myself, could confront the elephant in the room (watching Making Love in 1982 or An Early Frost in 1985 both come to mind as prompting those awkward moments).

Twenty-five or so years later, there my mom and I sat in the same family room in the same family house, companionably watching Rosie and Joy cut up about sexuality, and listening to four women on daytime tv admonish the likes of Ted Haggard for his blatant falsehoods and evasions and chastise Snickers for thinking that their homophobic ad might sell candy (the ad has since been pulled, thanks to protests from queer organizations like GLAAD). I found myself moved by how far we’ve come (publicly and privately, in society and in my family), if it’s now possible that gay and lesbian issues can be raised as easily as the unfortunate exploits of obviously psychotic astronaut Lisa Nowak, whose story followed Haggard’s as fodder for The View's co-hosts.

Perhaps The View is politics lite; of course it’s politics lite. But I wasn’t sorry that my mom heard Rosie and Joy and Barbara and Elisabeth discussing gay issues so positively, and I was glad, in fact, that other women of her age and predilections across middle-America were hearing the same. If change happens by accretion, the views expressed on The View, openly and articulately shared with what seems to be its fairly conventional audience, are a very good thing indeed.

Surprised and impressed,
The Feminist Spectator

Notes on a Scandal

I love a good juicy potboiler, and it doesn’t hurt when the leads are women (played in this case by the superlative Judi Dench and the wonderful Cate Blanchett). It does hurt that Notes on a Scandal’s plot—adapted from a novel by Zoe Heller—trades in stereotypes of the “vampire lesbian,” the frigid spinster, and the bitter, battle axe school teacher, but Dench’s acting mitigates these images to an extent that makes the film worth seeing.

Dench plays Barbara Covett, the longtime school teacher intrigued by the lithe (and blithe) new art teacher, Sheba Hart. Their names set up the basic plot device: through prurient entries in her long-running journal, to which the audience is privy through deliciously deluded voiceovers, Barbara writes that she feels Sheba is “the one I’ve waited for,” and begins to covet her close friendship and even her body, at which she gazes with a barely contained lascivious longing throughout the film.

Sheba approaches middle age with a dawning disappointment in how her life has transpired, undone by what she calls the “gap” between life as it is and life as she imagined it would be. Listening only to her heart, she’s manipulated into an impetuous affair with a 15-year-old student who plays on her beauty and her liberal sympathies to seduce her. When Barbara discovers the affair, she decides to use the secret to claim Sheba’s affections and her intimacy, ever increasing the stridency and unreasonableness of her emotional demands until the secret unravels and both women come to a qualified ruin.

Their class status has everything to do with how far (or not) these women fall. Sheba comes to teaching on something of a lark, desperate for some freedom from her family rather than because she really needs to work. Her much older husband (played with amused then wounded, lanky playfulness by Bill Nighy) was her teacher at university; her teenaged daughter is absorbed in her own romantic angst; and her affectionate 10-year-old son was born with Down’s syndrome. Their clearly upper-middle class home, inherited from a monied family, is full of noise and clutter, dancing and laughter, and the intimate, casual physical intimacy they bring along.

One of the best scenes in the film brings Barbara to Sheba’s pleasantly upended household for a Sunday lunch, keenly highlighting their differences and the reasons why the ascetic Barbara would be attracted to Sheba’s warm, overflowing life. Taking the invitation way too seriously, the usually disheveled schoolmarm buys a new outfit and accessories, has her hair done and her face made up, and arrives at Sheba’s door full of excitement barely cloaked in what she thinks is the proper formality.

Dench stands before the doorbell, wiping sweating palms on her new suit, hesitating before she rings, her face full of painfully absurd hope and expectation. That brief moment captures the desire of the outcast. Even though by that point, we know that Barbara is insane, her girlish anticipation and social awkwardness is wrenching and strangely moving. She’s out of a league she both wants to infiltrate and wants to dismantle.

The husband, Richard, greets Barbara and the daughter scrutinizes her while Sheba romps elsewhere with the son, Ben. When the daughter asks impertinently why she’s all dressed up, Barbara lies and says she has a later appointment, instantly adapting herself to her changed circumstances. When the family stages their after-dinner dance ritual, Barbara watches what she calls their “bourgeois bohemian behavior” with marked scorn, until Richard insists that she join them. She protests weakly, letting him pull her to her feet, then stands awkwardly, watching the family’s bodies moving freely all around her. Desperate to appear to belong, Barbara begins to move hesitantly, pushing her body about with little jerks that make her look ridiculous. This, too, neatly captures Barbara’s desire to be and to have something that eludes her.

These early scenes provide more layered, nuanced observations of character. Once Barbara discovers Sheba’s affair, the film drops precipitously into melodrama and the unfortunate stereotypes that drive Barbara’s character become more evident. In grim voiceover, she conspires to bind Sheba closer by keeping the secret of her affair, but the costs for both women grow large. When Barbara’s beloved cat Portia dies, Barbara insists that Sheba accompany her to the vet, literally pulling her between her own needs and those of Sheba’s family, who wait impatiently in their family station wagon to leave for Ben’s first-ever school performance. Sheba “naturally” chooses her family against Barbara’s unnatural expectations; Barbara flies into a rage and leaks the secret of her affair.

When the boy’s utterly ordinary parents find out that his teacher is abusing him, they drive to the Hart house for a confrontation that’s staged as a cat fight between the boy’s mother and Sheba, precipitating the descent of media hounds who feed on Sheba’s shame. Her daughter screams at Sheba for having sex with a boy younger than her own boyfriend, and Richard kicks Sheba out of the family home. She flies into Barbara’s waiting arms and hides in her small dark apartment until, inevitably, she finds Barbara’s diary and understands that she’s been a pawn in the older woman’s deluded machinations.

Barbara, it seems, has a history of these thwarted relationships with younger women, all documented in hardback journals that line her shelves, inexorably documenting a lifetime of fantasy driven by loneliness. Her last “friend” had a restraining order taken out on her when Barbara threatened her pending marriage. The schoolmaster forces Barbara to resign her post when he suggests he’ll reveal her “perversions” to the community. But his threat is unnecessary, since the press, at least in screenwriter Patrick Marber’s hands, already taunts Barbara, calling her “dyke” and insinuating that her care for Sheba is less than altruistic.

Sheba, too, when she finally understands Barbara’s self-interest, attacks the woman for her desire, asking incredulously if Barbara thought they would be lovers. Barbara begs her not to diminish their relationship with such degradations, but the point is made: it’s not Sheba’s moral vacuity that’s at issue, finally, but Barbara’s perverse longings that the film damns most resolutely.

In the typical vampire lesbian story, though, the older woman’s young “victim” is an unspoiled innocent. Although Barbara here notes Sheba’s creamy, unblemished peach complexion, she’s hardly a virgin. Sheba, in fact, is a spoiled, arrogant woman, who feels entitled to what her whims dictate. She teaches because she’s bored with keeping her home; she can’t articulate why she has the affair with the student, except to say that she wanted him. She unloads her superficial needs on Barbara, who soaks them up and twists them for her own purposes, but scenes of the two women talking in Sheba’s studio clarify that, in fact, the relationship suits Sheba, since Barbara is an attentive, apparently self-abnegating friend.

Ultimately, the film resolves its crisis quickly and predictably. Sheba returns home, where her husband takes her back wordlessly (in a scene played by Nighy and Blanchett with more nuance than any of the spoken dialogue provides) and stands beside her through her trial and sentencing (to a rather paltry 10 months in jail).

Barbara resigns her teaching post, buries her cat, and returns to the hillside aerie where she takes all her would-be paramours, only to find her next young female prey already sitting on her favorite bench. Dench’s sidelong glances at the pretty girl are full of renewed hope and rekindled desire; perhaps, in fact, this is the one.

Notes on a Scandal offers a diverting 90 minutes of watching great actors find depths in superficial, stereotypical material. But wouldn’t it be nice if such skilled women actors could apply their talents to a script that didn’t trade in tired images of female sexuality? Wouldn’t it be a boon to our imaginations if the boy with Down’s wasn’t used by the script to secure the husband’s saintliness and the wife’s martyrdom, to somehow explain and justify her extramarital dalliance? Wouldn’t it be delightful to finally drive a stake through the heart of the vampire lesbian?

I think so.

Ever hopeful,
The Feminist Spectator

"Dexter" on Showtime

The season ended last month for this new Showtime series, but it’s worth watching out for the DVD release and for the new season in 2007. Dexter Morgan is a serial killer (whose victims are rarely found or investigated) who kills for altruistic reasons, dispatching neatly (literally, neatly) with people who for various reasons “normal” society would consider the scum of the earth.

In his day job, Dexter works for the Miami Police Department as a “blood spatter expert” (a new position, at least as far as I know, in my vast knowledge of crime shows), who analyses murder scenes for clues in what the exsanguinated have left behind.

In the PD crew aspect of the show, Dexter is a cut above routine. The lab work here integrates more seamlessly with conventional gumshoe detective work, blending the best of the now heavily edited, effects-laden CSI series with the more hard-bitten face-to-face investigative sensibility of the Law and Order series. The detectives and crime scene analysts are rich characters on Dexter, although each serves his or her own neat purpose in a fairly generic way.

The squad is lead by Latina lieutenant Maria LaGuerta, whose scrappy, anti-authority pose gets her demoted by the season’s end. Her second is an African American sergeant named James Doakes, who carries a large chip of professional and social jealousy on his shoulder and aims his aggression primarily at Dexter. This conflict sets up the central terms of the show’s engagement with masculinity: James is muscled and butch, given to pulling his gun instinctively and quickly, while Dexter enters crime scenes inquisitively and instinctively, his stature smaller, slinkier, and somewhat fey. James’ bald head gleams rather ominously through the season, while Dexter can’t seem to find a decent razor and wears his beard’s shadow like a sign of his apparent disregard for appearances.

The rest of the squad rounds out the now de rigueur rainbow effect of “hip” television shows, yet here, too, the characters rise above their racial expediencies. Batista is a recently-divorced Cuban-American who wears guayaberas and bowler hats and works on more cerebral instincts than James or Dexter. Dexter’s Japanese-American assistant investigator wears his thick, slipping spectacles like a proud badge of his trade and quips at unlikely moments in sardonic, often very funny ways. Both characters serve their functions as smart squad members, and both reveal surprising vulnerabilities.

Dexter’s sister Deb and his girlfriend Rita round out the cast of characters and their conflicts. Deb offers spectators questions rather than answers about Dexter’s past, since the first season’s trajectory aims to reveal why Dexter kills and why blood is not just his profession but his obsession. Dexter, as we know from the start, was adopted. Although he loves Deb (in the extremely limited way of which his character is capable), he’s not related to her by blood, and blood (without spoiling the season’s ending) becomes determining in the relationships Dexter pursues and confronts.

Deb, too, is a police officer on the squad; she’s just transferred in, and has to prove herself. She’s also the love-deluded woman who ends up in grave distress, a rather pat role that actor Jennifer Carpenter and the generally smart script work against by giving Deb an easily provoked kind of seething rage. Where Dexter’s repressions keep him battened down (even though he reports, in his voiceovers, that sometimes his head feels like it might explode), Deb’s emotions run rampant over murder scenes and her personal life (especially when they overlap). Their contrasting characters—he, all secret depths and evasions, she, all surface and heart—and their insistent commitment to each other based on nurture rather than nature provides the show’s heart.

Dexter’s relationship with Rita, his girlfriend, is more fraught, ambivalent, and convenient. Rita’s recently removed herself and her two young kids from a marriage with a drug-, wife-, and child-abusing husband, whose early release from prison makes him a taunting, complicating presence throughout the season. Rita struggles to ward off her ex’s persistent intrusions back into her life, but she’s weak and vague, damaged by history and uncertain how to handle the future. Dexter’s placid, competent exterior makes him a perfect mate for her, and her fluttering femininity and goopy sweetness make her a perfect beard for him, since his sex drive is sublimated into his executions of evil-doers.

Rita gives Dexter a cover for his distinct lack of conventional masculinity. Since he’s played by Michael C. Hall, who spent all those seasons as the gay mortician brother David on HBO’s Six Feet Under, the ghost of David haunts Hall’s rendition of Dexter. People sense Dexter has a secret; what in other narratives would be his homosexuality is, here, his propensity for killing bad people. People know there’s something damaged about Dexter, but his fellow characters don’t have the benefit of the quick, teasing flashbacks the audience is fed of a little boy in a blood-soaked room, screaming as his mother is slashed apparently to death.

We know his murderous instincts come from a traumatic past, but it’s interesting to see the other characters try to figure out Dexter’s “problem,” for which queerness is always a presumption close to hand. That Dexter is not at all a closet case but a serial killer is one of the show’s witticisms, although in the final showdown between Dexter and the Ice Truck Killer—the villain du season—homoeroticism leaks into the scene like a distinct, ineradicable, and rather melancholy perfume.

The show’s blood, guts, and gore no doubt appeal to some viewers and require turned heads for others, but the witty writing and the provocative, twisting, season-length story-line offers another level of pleasure, as the writers strew clues around the complicated narrative. The show’s cinematography is equally eloquent and droll. In the weekly opening sequence, the camera captures Dexter’s hands caressing everyday objects in extreme close up, uncovering the innate if hidden violence of, for instance, a razor dragged down a face, or a sharp knife pressed through the skin of an orange or the flesh of a steak. Dexter establishes these quotidian equivalences as if to suggest that the violence our culture sensationalizes lingers close to the everyday, or that there’s only a difference of degree between shaving and slaying someone, between cutting the flesh of a steak and the flesh of a person.

The script sets out murky moral quandaries without taking them too seriously. Much such rumination is covered in Dexter’s wry, contemplative voiceovers, purposefully Chandleresque in language and tone. But his reveries often subtly point out our culture’s hypocrisy when it comes to how we celebrate empty notions of “family” (Dexter’s adoptive father saved him from the traumatic horror scene but betrayed him by keeping a crucial part of his history hidden); of love (as Dexter goes through the motions of sex and affection with Rita, even as he occasionally feels a glimmer of something like emotion); and especially of vengeance.

In the last scene of the first season, after the villain is unmasked and dispatched, the moment slips into fantasy, as Dexter imagines “what it would be like to reveal everything.” He and Deb move through a mob of people and police, whose faces and hands move in to congratulate Dexter on a job well done. He smiles with delight as the crowd chants his name, and wave pictures of him outlined in patriotic bunting. Red-white-and-blue confetti falls as the crowd heralds Dexter as an American hero.

But as the scene dissolves, Dexter admits that his survival depends on living his life in hiding (like the other vigilante superheroes whom he in some way resembles: Clark Kent/Superman, Bruce Wayne/Batman). But he knows and we know that if the crowd knew the truth, they’d appreciate it and want to celebrate him just as they do in Dexter’s fantasy.

That’s the pleasure of Dexter: the wish fulfillment of the ineffectual nebbish who’s secretly smarter than everyone and sees that justice is done, even as his moral landscape is flooded with ethical doubt and emotional ambivalence. Somehow, I can’t help celebrating Dexter’s queer victories, and looking forward to more in 2007.

The Feminist Spectator

Againt the Recent Reich . . .

Regarding Robert Reich’s Wednesday, December 20th commentary on "Marketplace" on American Public Radio:

http://marketplace.publicradio.org/shows/2006/12/20/AM200612201.html

While I usually appreciate Robert Reich’s astute analyses of the country’s economic peccadilloes, I find him way off the mark in suggesting that the tax code should limit charitable deductions to “real” charities and not to the arts and cultural institutions. Few would quibble with the excesses Reich offers as examples: yes, a donation to Harvard, which already boasts the largest university endowment in the nation, might seem self-indulgent, a ruse of the rich to ensure their progeny’s future access. It’s also easy to mock a gala dinner held by captains of industry for New York’s Lincoln Center arts complex.

But obscured by Reich’s heavy sarcasm is the fact that public educational institutions now receive very little federal or even state support, and that the arts have been summarily taken off the list of federal funders’ priorities because they’ve been made a political football by the conservative right.

If the wealthy can’t declare deductions for their largess to education and the arts, to whom could more upstart, avant-garde, community-based arts organizations turn for support as they struggle to establish themselves? In Austin, Texas, where I live, yes, we watch with despair as our public university pours millions of dollars into expanding its already mammoth stadium and upgrading the perks for its star student athletes, while the College of Fine Arts cowers, under-funded and under-appreciated, in its shadow. Would that every “Texas-ex” who gives a dollar to the Longhorns would kick in another for the arts.

But legislating against charitable donations such as these would also mean that Austin’s rich array of small arts organizations would no doubt expire. Without the deductible donations that support their operating budgets and their capital campaigns, and that pay their artists a living wage to use their imaginations to improve the world, we’d see the quick demise of the dozens of performance companies that enhance our local quality of life daily.

These arts organizations also serve the Austin community, engaging residents in the performance, music, film, art, and culture who might not otherwise be invited to share their stories on stage, or to participate in a filmmaking event, because of their race, class, or level of education. The arts in Austin do, as Reich proposes, try to make a difference for the poor.

I hope Robert Reich can nuance his argument, so that he’s not advocating that the bathwater of wealth donating to wealth be thrown out with the baby of tax incentive-supported private patronage for the arts and education.

The Feminist Spectator

Drag King Dreams

[Note: Once again I apologize for the six week lag time between entries. The academic semester foiled me again. With the December holidays here now, and looking forward to being on leave next semester, I should be able to meet the challenge of bi-monthly writing.]

I read Leslie Feinberg’s classic novel about transgender experience, Stone Butch Blues, 10 years ago, although the book itself was published in 1993 (by Firebrand Books; a 10th anniversary edition was published by Alyson Press in 2003). Feinberg has always been at the forefront of transgender politics, well before they became a more visible issue in progressive movements around gender and sexuality. Hers was the first fictionalized autobiography to address the complications of being a subject born a woman, living in a body purposefully constructed as masculine. I recall being captivated and moved by the story of his/her (or hir, the compromise, composite transgender pronoun Feinberg uses in his new book, Drag King Dreams) challenges and triumphs, and learning more than I knew about what it means to be (as Max, the hero of Feinberg’s current novel describes it) fluent in the languages of gender, but only able to articulate yourself in one—and not the one that dominant society has assigned to you.

Reading Drag King Dreams 10 years after Stone Butch Blues is a less revelatory experience. The book’s heart is large and earnest; Feinberg remains a righteous crusader for not only trans rights, but for a progressive coalitional politics that draws careful connections among gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, class, and ability oppressions, as well as immigration rights and the complex suppression of freedom prompted by the post-9/11 security crackdown. By demonstrating these interlocking systems of power and their tactile effects on people’s lives, Feinberg brings home polemics that might otherwise feel abstract and distant. I applaud the novel for the sincerity of its passionate political vision, even while the construction of its sentences sometimes makes me wince.

Max Rabinowitz, the hero of Drag King Dreams, is an aging transman, a denizen of the night who scrapes by without bank accounts or credit cards, eking out a living in a twilight cash economy by working as a bouncer and then a bartender in two different Manhattan clubs. Both cater to drag kings and queens, and other queer people who consciously perform their genders of choice and likewise choose their names, rather than living under the proscriptions of the ones assigned them at birth. Thor, Deacon, and Weasel all act as men; Ruby and Jasmine act as women, although in the trans cosmology, it’s more apt to look at these characters through degrees of gender performance and desire.

Max’s family of choice is a panoply of race and ethnicity, drawn more tightly together by the brutal death of their friend Vickie, who was most likely killed by someone motivated by lethal hate. Vickie’s death haunts the narrative; it’s the sign of fate with which each character grapples as they make their way through a social world where everything is dangerous for their people. (Or, as they call each other, their “family,” neatly resignifying the conventional understanding of the now fraught word.)

Thor, for example, is arrested for using a bathroom; Feinberg doesn’t specify if Thor used a “men’s” or “women’s” room. It doesn’t much matter, since Thor clearly doesn’t quite “fit” in either. His liminality causes his arrest. Feinberg positions the police throughout the novel as agents of oppressive, uncaring, unchecked power and hatred. They roughly cart Thor away to jail, where they beat him up and most likely assault him in other ways that Feinberg leaves us only to imagine.

Ruby, the drag queen who is Max’s intimate, falls ill early in the story, and is taken, although she’s uninsured, to a local hospital, where she is humiliated by nurses who call her “sir” and sneer at the transgendered caregivers who stand staunchly by her side. Unwilling to be subjected to the physical and emotional brutality of those for whom her birth gender is fixed, static, and determining, Ruby insists that Max sign her out of the hospital, and leaves, regally leaning on his arm.

Jewishness crosses trans in Drag King Dreams as another part of an identity that requires Max to stage his public resistance. His cousin, Heshie, is a differently abled computer geek, who lives in a cold water warehouse dreaming up virtual reality games and developing software that frees people from the limitations of their flawed or otherwise constraining flesh. Through Heshie’s technology, Max explores alternate realities in which he can look for others like him, or feel what it might mean to fly, unleashed from the gravity that ties him to conventional notions of identity.

Max and Heshie fight over the politics of Israel and Palestine, with Max arguing for a Palestinian homeland and Heshie for a two-state solution. Their Jewishness and the strength of their history as mishpoche (or birth family) isn’t enough to make them the “same” or to let them find “home” with each other without struggle or accommodation. Heshie instantly offers shelter when unknown assailants with most likely political motives trash Max’s apartment. Max appreciates the temporary solution to his transience, but they both know that while they might be blood family, they’re not “home” to one another.

Max’s search for “home” in fact propels the narrative’s fits and starts. The book refuses more conventional crises and resolutions. While Vickie’s death begins the story and her memorial service happens near its end, other incidents crop up and melt away with what feels like little consequence. Max befriends two Arab men who live in his neighborhood; one of them disappears mysteriously after a political demonstration, which teaches Max about the precariousness of life for people of Middle Eastern descent living in the States after 9/11. He finds common cause with Mohammed, the man left behind, who protects Max’s belongings when the thugs trash his place, and feeds him with a tenderness exactly opposite the brutality he finds at the hands of the police who supposedly keep the nation safe.

Max entertains several tentative flirtations, one with his friend Jasmine, the Asian-American transperson who manages the clubs at which their friends work together as a team. Another flirtation happens on line, in a game Heshie gives Max called AvaStar, an LGBTQ environment that nonetheless requires players to enter through two-gendered locker rooms where they assume identities that even in virtual reality can’t accommodate the kind of flexibility Max needs to feel whole. Max, entering under the screen name “Pollygender,” signals his more complex gendered performance by awkwardly translating the semiotics of the street through the controls of the virtual space. Several other players are astute enough to read his signs and ask to meet him privately. One is a femme, the other more ambiguously described, but both seem to “get” Max and his multifaceted difference, even in this simulated place.

These moments of virtual play mix with historical time in Drag King Dreams, as the people Max meets in these futuristic internet environments reveal themselves as rather old-fashioned gender rebels, some of whom even call themselves lesbians. When asked if he’s a lesbian, Max responds yes, even though the material world through which he moves requires more complicated identifications. The AvaStar moments are at once the book’s most hopeful and most strangely nostalgic, sentimental, perhaps, for old gay and lesbian and butch and femme communities of face to face interaction, support, and love. While his screen interactions highlight Max’s loneliness, they also gesture toward the possibility of connection, both online and off.

The book’s central tension lies in its effort to recreate community through the eyes of a character who’s become an inveterate loner. Over the course of the book, Max begins to remember an earlier activist moment in which he and Ruby planned marches and plotted proactively to make change. The story’s finale finds him and his friends back in jail, arrested at a march against injustice they planned and led. But in between these two eras of his character, the story meanders a bit, as Max slowly works his way back toward the possibility of his own liberation.

Feinberg’s writing lacks a certain nuance; Max’s feelings tremor close to the surface of the author’s language, and often, his politics overwhelm any depth of characterization the story might otherwise achieve. Max’s conversations with his friends often devolve into polemics, whether he’s arguing about Israel with Heshie or talking about the old days with Ruby. We don’t learn much about anyone aside from how they proceed through the trials of the present. What Feinberg imagines of their pasts seems contrived only to explain current oppressions.

Yet if Feinberg skimps on her characters’ depth and individuality, she’s committed to drawing out what connects them to each other and the tenaciousness of their bonds. At Vickie’s memorial service, Max relates a proverb passed on by the Yiddishe aunt who raised him: “Tell me who you know; I’ll tell you who you are” (220). This crystallizes Feinberg’s point: that a relationship, or a community, or a movement consists of the lines drawn between us by history, by labor, and by commitment to an idea of family much deeper than origins, because these new ones are families we make and nurture and refuse to see sundered.

Feinberg’s generation of transgendered activists claimed their connection to gay and lesbian, feminist, and civil rights. Although Feinberg never places her characters in specific age groups, they acknowledge that a younger generation has come up after them whose issues and lives are different in myriad ways. Yet another of the hopeful moments in the novel comes at the team’s climactic march for gender rights in Sheridan Square, the historic site of the Stonewall uprising in 1969. Ruby fights a cordon of obstructive police to join her cohort with a younger generation of transpeople working their way toward them to protest by their sides. That commitment to trans-generational thinking and coalition demonstrates Feinberg’s insistent faith in the potential for change.

In fact, Max’s belief in possibility resurrects itself over the book’s arc. By the end, despite their incarceration and the uncertainty of their release, Max and his friends are planning their next demonstration and making more connections to others who are disappeared or dispossessed. A loud, aggressively supportive, activist crowd lobbies for them on the station house steps.

Throughout the book, Feinberg writes obliquely about each characters’ race and gender; for example, we don’t know if Deacon is female or male, black or white. We know Max is “he” and Jewish; that Thor is a drag king; that Ruby dresses like a woman; that Jasmine, too, dresses like a woman and is Asian. But their chosen names conceal their bodies and identities of origin on the page, requiring us to accept them according to what they call themselves and by the gender and sexuality Feinberg tells us they perform.

Only at the very last moment of the novel do we hear their birth names, as each of Max’s family of friends is called out of the common jail cell in which they’ve been conveniently held. As policemen come to collect each character individually, the officers read from clipboards their original names: The stolid Thor, who took his name from the Norwegian god of thunder, is called out of the cell as “Carol Finster.” For the glorious, glamorous Ruby, they call “Tyrone Lanier.” The enigmatic Deacon is harnessed to the prosaic “Ronald Jackson.” And finally, as he dreams of the resurgence of community in which the living mingle once again with the dead (the literary equivalent of the fantasy party that ends the first gay film about HIV/AIDS, Longtime Companion), an officer comes for Max, sneering at his Jewish surname, then attaching it to his first, calling, “Maxine Rabinowitz.”

With these final two words, Feinberg drives home how far “Maxine” is from describing Max and his world, and let’s us feel that the state’s investment in this official identity (which Max has long since overthrown) is superfluous, ridiculous, and archaic. And yet by that name, Max remains affixed to state power as closely as a photo is laminated to a driver’s license, always subject to its ability to maim her physically, emotionally, and politically. Hence the need for drag kings to dream.

Drag Queen Dreams isn’t great literature. But it does manage to bring home how ideology pierces our flesh, and to illustrate how the complications of identity overflow the apparatus of a state (and a body) that would contain it neatly and enforce it brutally.

On "The Road"

Cormac McCarthy isn’t an author I’ve ever before read. Even in good reviews, his books have always sounded rather male-identified. That is, they seem to be resolutely, openly, avowedly, unashamedly about men. And that’s fine. It’s just that those aren’t the kinds of novels I usually pick up and enjoy.

But reviews of The Road intrigued me, and reading the book, I was powerfully moved, so I’m recommending it here. I can’t offer you background on McCarthy, or compare this latest novel to his oeuvre. I can only offer you my impressions and how it felt to be carried along by this story and the searing images McCarthy has wrought.

The story is simple, bleak in its desperate elegance. A man and a 10-year-old boy walk empty interstate highways in a post-apocalypse environment, consulting frayed pieces of an ancient map to find their way south or to a coast. McCarthy doesn’t explain how they came to be on their journey. The little bits of back-story he provides appear like moments of color in an otherwise black and white film. No exposition cushions the catastrophe of the world through which they move.

Pushing ahead of them a shopping cart that holds meager possessions covered by a rotting tarp, the man and the boy (neither have names) follow the blistered black top, watching behind them for the “bad guys” that might not just impede their journey, but ruthlessly end their lives.

Their lives, such as they are, seem hardly worth saving. They forage for food and approach starvation numerous times through the short narrative, which takes place over the course of a few months or so. The road they walk is covered in gray ash, the landscape unrelieved by color or even movement, except when the weather shifts and cold winds or lashing rains drive them under their makeshift shelter.

Their clothes are ragged, their shoes long since disintegrated. Their bodies are filthy, their hair matted, their bones sharp under their skin, and the father’s lungs are wracked by a hacking cough that sometimes incapacitates him. Both wear face masks covered with soot to protect their breath from the toxic air through which they move.

Their conversation runs in fits and starts, short, declarative sentences often as simple as “okay” or “I don’t know.” Few adverbs or adjectives adorn the prose, and yet you can hear, as you read, the quality of their voices, the care they take with parceling out their emotions in a world in which despair and desperation seem the only logical things to feel.

Their exchanges are full, the father’s with his concern for his child, the child’s with a protective silence about the truth of their existence. They perform for each other a kind of normality, a refusal of resignation, a determination just short of hope, that keeps them trudging toward a destination they can barely even imagine. Their interactions are tender, full of love they never directly express.

In the spare, waste-free poetry of his words, McCarthy renders the intimacy of utter solitude. The man and the boy could be the last people on earth; there’s no way to communicate outside of their brief exchanges with each other. They know they’re not alone, that bands of villainous cannibals who roam this perverse world could appear at any moment. This keeps the narrative tense with the unknown and unexpected, even as McCarthy underlines the tedium of days and weeks lived simply pushing the fragile cart through a landscape of obstruction and debris.

The horror the father and son encounter is unimaginable, and yet seems such a likely outcome for a world in which nuclear annihilation is always possible. Cities stand empty and gray, their buildings rifled by the few survivors that people the place. Houses are ransacked for food and firewood, clothing and blankets. No one, it seems, can stay anywhere permanently, because the danger of the marauding bands of “bad guys” is too grave.

The bad guys are the cannibals, who roast headless infants on spits in the woods, soulless haunts who ramble like anarchists through a world in which rules no longer apply. The few close-ups McCarthy provides of these degenerate beings are chilling. The fact that the women among them are pregnant is both frustrating in its apparent misogyny—that even in a post-nuclear holocaust landscape, women would be barefoot and pregnant—and nauseating, in the presumption of a future signaled from within the wombs of this new world’s most evil antagonists. Perhaps the women are simply growing their own food.

In fact, when the man and boy come unexpectedly to a house with a locked cellar, the father works fiercely to open it, assuming that only food could be guarded so securely. When the door opens and he ventures down the stairs, finding his way with an old lighter, he sees filthy, naked men and women huddled together, blinking in the light. One person lies on a table, the stumps of his legs bleeding freely. One of these creatures approaches the man, saying simply, “Help us.”

But in this ethical economy, survivors can only help themselves. Any care they might extend would mean less to keep themselves alive. The man retreats up the stairs, relocking the door behind him. He knows he’s leaving fellow human beings to their fate as food; he knows that he did indeed break into a trove of nourishment, one palatable only for those who could bear to eat their own kind. McCarthy inverts the comforting domestic tropes of so much fiction; if this house is a womb, then like the women the man and boy see through its windows, it can only be incubating a new supply of humans to be eaten by others.

The father responds dispassionately to these horrors, saving his rage for moments late in the obsidian nights when the boy sleeps and the father is up, coughing and railing at a god he knows doesn’t exist. He recalls snippets of a “before,” not before this holocaust, but before he and the boy set out on the road. His wife killed herself, refusing to stay alive only to wait for a sure and violent death. He can remember only flashes of color, light, and sound, of birds that used to fly. His memory holds references to signs that no longer have meaning; the boy has never seen live birds, has never known a world that wasn’t covered with gray sludge and inflicted with vicious weather.

The boy, though, is the story’s moral voice. When he and the man meet a little boy his age, darting in and out of abandoned buildings, the father’s boy wants to save him, take him with them on their journey. But the pragmatic father shunts aside his own compassion to save themselves.

Later, a lone man robs them, stealing their cart and its contents. The father and son track him down and when they overtake and disarm him, the father forces the thief to strip, taking his clothes along with their belongings and leaving the man alone in the road. The boy is stricken with grief, knowing that there are tantamount to murdering the man. But the father insists that the thief intended to kill them. The world around them might be monochromatically gray, but the father’s actions brook no shadings. Survival can only accommodate black or white, yes or no, life or death.

The boy and his father “carry the fire,” which seems both metaphorical and mystical in The Road. One way or another, even when they don’t have food or water, the father lights a fire every night, gathering wood that remains plentiful, and starting the flame in ways McCarthy never describes. The fire also seems internal; the father and son are the “good guys,” plodding forward toward a future they don’t even know exists.

[Spoiler alert.]

When they arrive at the coast, when they can go no further, they still keep walking, tracing their way along the shore, weaving inland and back again to the beach. The ocean is no longer blue as the father remembered and the boy had hoped, but now just pestilential waves of gray water crashing on blackened sand. The father falls fatally ill and won’t survive. He tries to secure the boy’s safety, teaching him to go on as they have before, keeping with him the pistol that’s the barest insurance of their potential security, even though all but one of its bullets are carved from wood and wax instead of metal. They go on, determined:

“They went on. Treading the dead world under like rats on a wheel.
The nights dead still and deader black. So cold. They talked hardly
at all. He coughed all the time and the boy watched him spitting
blood. Slumping along. Filthy, ragged, hopeless. He’d stop and
lean on the cart and the boy would go on and then stop and look back and he
would raise his weeping eyes and see him standing there in the road looking back
at him from some unimaginable future, glowing in that waste like a tabernacle”
(230).

This strikes me as a powerful statement of faith in a desolate, spiritless world.

I won’t reveal The Road’s end, since part of what compelled me through the book was wondering how McCarthy would finish a story that only seemed able to close in one cataclysmic way. Instead, the final moments of the book accomplish the most remarkable feat of all, which is to instill hope in the midst of utter despair.

I looked at my world through new eyes as I read The Road, suddenly aware of the depth of color and texture and sound and life that surrounds me every moment. McCarthy’s achievement is to capture so viscerally what it would be like to be the only living beings in a dead landscape, and the utter desolation of trying to keep not only your body, but your spirit, alive.

The world he paints so horribly, though, doesn’t seem that far-fetched, given North Korea’s posturing about its nuclear program, and the fear that Iran, too, is building a nuclear arsenal. McCarthy refuses to draw these analogies, or to lay blame, or even to explain what’s happened to the world as we think we know it.

He doesn’t have to. Reading The Road, you instantly understand that the landscape he depicts is the inevitable outcome of the insanity of human power gone tragically awry, of human dominion taken to one of its logical, malevolent extremes. That McCarthy also persuades you by the end that benevolence and love can continue to exist in such an ethical wilderness makes The Road an intense and moving read.

And strangely analogous to a stunningly hopeful historical moment in which the Democrats have regained Congress.

To the future, then,
The Feminist Spectator