by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2017 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I put on ABC for the
much-hyped first episode of When We Rise, a four-part series chronicling the Gay liberation movement (I’m old
enough to remember when “Gay” was considered a sufficiently inclusive term for
all Queer folk, and rue their disappearance and ultimate replacement by that
series of initials, which now seems to have expanded to “LGBTQ” and will probably
get even longer before the madness stops — the Queer student group at UCSD
identifies itself as “LGBTQQIAA,” meaning “Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender,
Queer, Questioning, Intersex, Asexual and Allies,” the last being the term of
art for straight people who support Queer rights) from its initial validation
by Life magazine in 1972 (they run
a feature called “1971: The Year in Pictures,” and one of its stories is about
the heady early days of Gay liberation) and around three real-life people in
particular: Cleve Jones (Austin P. MacKenzie, later played by Guy Pearce), a
young Gay kid from Arizona whose dad is a psychiatrist who makes no secret that
he thinks homosexuality is a mental illness and out of “love” for his son wants
him subjected to electroshock, lobotomy or one of the other nasty standard
“treatments” for his “disease”; Ken Jones (Jonathan Majors, later played by
Michael Kenneth Williams), a Black Gay Navy guy whose white boyfriend Michael
gets killed in action in Viet Nam, and his grief is compounded by his inability
to acknowledge their relationship; and Roma Guy (Emily Skeggs, later
Mary-Louise Parker), who discovers her Lesbianism when she falls in love with a
fellow woman volunteer in the Peace Corps. All three of these people end up in San
Francisco and live out the history of the Queer rights movement from the early
days dealing with police repression and Queer-bashing in San Francisco (under
Right-wing Democratic Mayor Joseph Alioto the city’s cops, most of them
Irish-American and hard-core Roman Catholics, set out to eliminate the city’s
hippies and Queers by virtually any means necessary — this is a bit of an
historical exaggeration but it’s close enough to the facts to work as period
drama) to the AIDS epidemic and its decimation of the Gay male community and
the modern era in which marriage equality became the movement’s defining demand
and was achieved when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled the Defense of Marriage Act
(DoMA) unconstitutional in 2013.
Alas, the main creators of the production are
two of my least favorite Queer filmmakers, director Gus Van Sant (who made one great film, Drugstore Cowboy, which he followed up with two of the all-time
worst movies ever made, My Own Private Idaho and the abysmal Gerry, which has the same place in the credits of recent
Best Actor Academy Award winner Casey Affleck as Grease II had in Michelle Pfeiffer’s) and screenwriter
Dustin Lance Black, who between them came up with the O.K. but heavily
sanitized biopic Milk, in
which tall, gangly, Gay Harvey Milk was played by short, wiry, straight Sean
Penn (though as I joked when I reviewed Milk for my movie blog, maybe Van Sant and Black
considered Penn an “honorary Gay” because he’d been married to Madonna).
Despite Van Sant’s proclamation in the production notes for Gerry that he doesn’t like films that emotionally involve the audience —
“Holding audiences in their seats: Why is that a filmmaker’s job?” he asks. “I
think there are a lot of ways of enchanting audiences, but I’ve noticed that
today, no matter what the subject is, the filmmaking is exactly the same,
whether it’s a really depressing story or one about a guy who saves the world.
It tries to get a rise out of the audience, and it’s got to be exciting.
Everything a filmmaker does is an effort to make it exciting for you as an
audience member” — When We Rise, or at least the first part thereof, is at its best when it is at its
most exciting, vividly dramatizing the horrendous risks involved in being
Queer, and especially in being
“out” and open about it, in 1972. (One aspect of this film was personal to me;
it made me glad I didn’t come out until the relatively “safe” time of 1982, a
decade later, at the tail end of the first decade of Queer liberation and
before AIDS not only threatened our lives but scared the shit out of us and
reinforced the homophobes’ argument that we were committing “crimes against
nature” and, as Pat Buchanan put it, nature was taking its revenge against us.)
Though Van Sant’s attempt to poach on Alfred Hitchcock’s territory by remaking Psycho was an epic box-office bomb, here he shows himself
a capable suspense director, especially in the scenes in which the younger,
baby-faced twink incarnation of Cleve Jones confronts police and finally gets
Gay-bashed.
Aside from its intense emotional moments, When We Rise is perched unevenly between “official history” and
a richer, deeper treatment of its subject; Black and Van Sant were all too well
aware when they were making it that this was likely to be just about the only
chance the story of the Queer movement was going to make it to a major
commercial TV network, and they tried as hard as possible to present the
history according to the orthodox Queer leadership’s consensus — though I give
them major points for acknowledging that it didn’t all start with the riots at the Stonewall Inn in
New York City in 1969 (elsewhere I’ve pointed out that not only was there a
continuous Queer activist movement in the U.S. from 1950, 19 years before Stonewall, but virtually all the major landmarks
in Queer activist history happened in my home state, California — about the
only ones that didn’t were Stonewall and the founding of the very first
Queer-rights organization in U.S. history in Chicago in 1924). When We Rise works best when it presents the political and
personal dilemmas of its characters as individual choices —when it offers them as
people rather than exemplars of a
movement — and it’s at its weakest when it tries to go for the Big Picture and
present their individual struggles as symbols of the broader whole (like the
scenes in which Roma tries to recruit Gay men to support her radical feminist
march against police violence against women, and the other women involved turn
on her because they regard men, all men, as their enemy).
I’m looking forward to the next episode,
scheduled for this Wednesday, March 1 at 9 p.m., but I’m also dreading how the
series is going to present AIDS — of which the orthodox view has become that it
was a terrible disaster and a major human tragedy, but it also did the Queer
community a service in that it helped break down the barriers between Gay men
and Lesbians (Lesbians famously rallied around their stricken Gay male comrades
and, with the life expectancy of Gay men plunging faster than the stock market
during a depression, largely took over leadership of the movement) and it ended
the intense period of sexual liberation that followed the explosion of the Gay
male movement in the early 1970’s and scared us all back into embracing
monogamy and demanding marriage and the right to raise children. While the
Queer movement isn’t the only civil-rights movement in history that started on
the fringes of its community among the people who had the least to lose, and
then moderated itself as more and more people with established jobs and
well-off lifestyles followed the trail blazed by the pioneers, it’s probably
the only one that tells such a highly moralistic story about itself, as if it
needed the lesson of a deadly disease associated with sexual experimentation
and freedom to be scared collectively back to the established social values of
committed relationships and what the more radical, liberationist Queers used to
call “straight-aping.” One silver lining in the terrible dark cloud of AIDS was
that it demonstrated to the world that Gay men did form committed and enduring relationships — all
those scenes of people showing up at hospitals and demanding to see their dying
partners helped break down the barrier of alienness and alerted at least some
of straight America to the fact that we love each other and form the same bonds
of caring and mutual emotional feeling as they do — but it’s come at a cost in
that the history of the 1970’s has been rewritten as a morality lesson that the
wages of nonmonogamy are literally death. It’s one reason why I held back from full support of marriage
equality for quite a long time — I didn’t want Queers who choose not to get married and don’t want to commit to just
one sex partner isolated and shamed the way all too many straight people who
make that same choice are in their community — and despite my own history of a 22-year relationship and a
legal marriage of nearly nine years to that person, it still bothers me that
Queers who don’t want to get married are made to feel like second-class citizens
within our own community.
Aside from that, When We Rise is also yet another one of those cultural
artifacts that plays quite differently in the era of TrumpAmerica than it would
have a few years ago (or would now if Hillary Clinton had won the presidency);
while it still seems unlikely that America is going to change as radically in
its attitude towards Queers as Germany did when the Weimar Republic fell and
was replaced by the Nazis (almost overnight Germany changed from being the most
accepting country in the world towards Queers to one that viciously repressed
us to the point of including us along with Jews, Gypsies and Communists among
the populations they wanted to exterminate), the administration of President
Trump and Vice-President Mike Pence has signaled that on Queer rights, as on
just about every other part of the progressive agenda, they’re going to throw
the arc of history into reverse and bend it towards injustice, repression and prejudice in the name of making
America great again — at least for white straight men with money.
