Gore Vidal on American tolerance

Discussing Brokeback Mountain, among other things:

Look, homophobia is fed into every child in the United States at birth. It is unrelenting, it never lets up. They asked a whole raft of high school boys across the country a couple years ago, one of those polls about what they would most like to be in life, and what – they would hate to be, and so forth, and what they would most hate to be was homosexual.

There wasn’t anyone, not one, who just skipped the question. They all said “oh no, that’s the worst thing you could be.”

To get over that training, that’s generation after generation. And it has not done the character of our nation much good. And that’s why we are a joke to the rest of the world, because we carry on about sexual matters everyone else has forgotten about.

So will this movie change anything? I think it might give some people a little more heart that what they’re doing is not so unusual. It is traditional, it is biologically correct; mammals have been performing same-sexual acts ever since the first mammal was created. I was not present, alas, at the time, but mammals do behave like that and to say they don’t or to try to frighten them as all those schoolboys have been frightened – well that kind of indoctrination is awful, it makes us seem like a very stupid country to other people, with stupid laws. People are in prison for having done “unnatural acts” as they call it.

Continues here.

The life and work of Derek Jarman

angelic.jpg

The Angelic Conversation, 1985.

An unseen woman recites Shakespeare’s sonnets—fourteen in all—as a man wordlessly seeks his heart’s desire. The photography is stop-motion, the music is ethereal, the scenery is often elemental: boulders and smaller rocks, the sea, smoke or fog, and a garden. The man is on an odyssey following his love. But he must first, as the sonnet says, know what conscience is. So, before he can be united with his love, he must purify himself. He does so, bathing a tattooed figure (an angel, perhaps) and humbling himself in front of this being. He also prepares himself with water and through his journey and his meditations. Finally, he is united with his fair friend.