Visibility matters. This is part of the tagline of AfterEllen.com, an awesome lesbian entertainment website and it is so true. Gay and lesbian visibility matters. It is important to help people understand that gay people aren't scary. It helps gay people feel less alone. Seeing yourself represented in your popular culture is important because it is something that we share. This is partly why so many gay ladies kept watching The L Word long after it had stopped being a show worth watching.
I could probably go on for days about lesbian visibility in movies, on TV and in music. It is something I feel very strongly about. But for today, I want to talk about the show The Voice. A singing competition show that I have fallen completely in love with. Also featuring two out lesbians in the top 4! This is a big deal. It is something that doesn't happen very often. And both ladies were voted into the top 4 by being the top voted members of their teams. Both are extremely amazing singers and enthralling performers. I hope to hell they pull off successful careers.
Vicci Martinez kills every performance she does. She has an amazing voice and ridiculous energy every time she takes the stage. Her voice hits a place in my heart that almost hurts due to the honesty and emotion that she puts into everything. I have watched her performance of 'Dog Days Are Over' so many times that I lost count.
Beverly McClellan is a 41 year old lesbian with a shaved head, facial piercings and lots of tattoos. She could never pass as straight. And last night she performed wearing a plaid shirt, a bandana, jeans and work boots, singing 'Beautiful' with Christina Aguilera and it kind of got me emotional. Beverly is beautiful. There is more than one way to be beautiful. Truth and honesty are beautiful. Seeing this performance made me feel so happy and a little less alone out in this world. Visibility matters. It does make a difference.
So why does this matter so much to me? Maybe because I grew up with a very limited number of pop culture portrayals of lesbians. Maybe that made it harder for me to accept myself. I didn't see myself anywhere. The only lesbians I saw anywhere for a long time were KD Lang, Melissa Etheridge and Ellen DeGeneres, who are all pretty great. But I am not butch, I am not an awesome rock star, and I was old enough to get that Ellen's career kind of tanked for a while after she came out. Also in my actual life, only my 8th grade French teacher was a lesbian and everyone hated her. She yelled at us a lot and had a mullet. I couldn't see my future in the images that I had. I knew I wasn't like everyone else, but was this really what I had to look forward to? Anger and mullets? By now I have the perspective to see how silly I was being, but at 13 I just felt scared and alone.
I am not saying that greater gay visibility would have made it easier, but it might have helped. It could have made a big difference for me. The lesbian movies of the 90s like But I'm a Cheerleader, Better than Chocolate and The Incredibly True Adventure of Two Girls in Love weren't exactly movies that I was either aware of or able to see at the time. I was a kid in Fredericton, NB. I didn't actually know anyone that I knew was gay. The only lesbians I remember seeing on TV very often were Carol and Susan on Friends. I didn't see myself anywhere reflected back. It was lonely. I was afraid. I didn't feel like I knew how to be who I really was.
I hope greater visibility can help. I hope it really does get better. I hope gay kids can feel better about themselves than I did. I hope for so much to change that it no longer feels almost revolutionary to have 2 lesbians on a reality competition show. I hope we can all feel a little less alone.
Wednesday, June 29, 2011
Tuesday, June 7, 2011
But I carry this feeling . . .
I have been spending a lot of time lately thinking. About my life. About my past. About my future. I never thought I would be where I am today. This was never where I thought I would be. That is not to say that I am unhappy with my life. In fact, it is mostly the opposite. I am pretty happy here and now. I can't really complain about most of it. But sometimes it doesn't feel like enough. Sometimes I want more.
Lately I have been in an indie film, old music type of place. I miss my best friend. I read a lot about feminism and some about pop culture. I spend a lot of time thinking about women's roles in movies and music, about how our society treats women, about how the standards that women are held to are weighing down on me so much that I am unbelievably exhausted from trying to live up to the expectations. I question why it has to be this way. I question why it seems to be more important to the world at large how I look than what I know. I ask why there are so few positive portrayals of gay women around me, why there is such little visibility and I ask if anyone cares. Sometimes I get angry about it all. I wonder what Canadians got ourselves into with this Conservative majority government we are now stuck with. I wonder why there hasn`t been enough progress to make it easier to be a woman.
I am about two thirds through reading The Beauty Myth and it still rings so true today, 20 years after it was written. It is scary how often I would read things about the professional beauty requirement, or the indoctrination into the beauty cult, or how female sexuality isn`t really our own and feel it click with what I have known all along but been unable to verbalize before. All those things in my head that made me feel so crazy for so long aren`t just me. They are real external forces that are driving hundreds of thousands of women crazy. The more freedoms women win, the tighter the constraints on our physical appearance become. It seems so clear to me now. I am kind of angry with myself for buying into it, for falling for it, for letting it hurt me so much. But it is so nice to know that it is no just me, that I am not just crazy like I thought for so long.
I wish that I could go back in time and take Women`s Studies when I was a student. Maybe it could have helped me avoid some of the bumps along the road. Or maybe I had to take the long way to get to where I am before it could click with me.
Lately I have been in an indie film, old music type of place. I miss my best friend. I read a lot about feminism and some about pop culture. I spend a lot of time thinking about women's roles in movies and music, about how our society treats women, about how the standards that women are held to are weighing down on me so much that I am unbelievably exhausted from trying to live up to the expectations. I question why it has to be this way. I question why it seems to be more important to the world at large how I look than what I know. I ask why there are so few positive portrayals of gay women around me, why there is such little visibility and I ask if anyone cares. Sometimes I get angry about it all. I wonder what Canadians got ourselves into with this Conservative majority government we are now stuck with. I wonder why there hasn`t been enough progress to make it easier to be a woman.
I am about two thirds through reading The Beauty Myth and it still rings so true today, 20 years after it was written. It is scary how often I would read things about the professional beauty requirement, or the indoctrination into the beauty cult, or how female sexuality isn`t really our own and feel it click with what I have known all along but been unable to verbalize before. All those things in my head that made me feel so crazy for so long aren`t just me. They are real external forces that are driving hundreds of thousands of women crazy. The more freedoms women win, the tighter the constraints on our physical appearance become. It seems so clear to me now. I am kind of angry with myself for buying into it, for falling for it, for letting it hurt me so much. But it is so nice to know that it is no just me, that I am not just crazy like I thought for so long.
I wish that I could go back in time and take Women`s Studies when I was a student. Maybe it could have helped me avoid some of the bumps along the road. Or maybe I had to take the long way to get to where I am before it could click with me.
Thursday, June 2, 2011
Fantastic Films
I have fallen back in love with Netflix this week. There are a lot of really amazing films, some of which I watched this week that really spoke to my love of cinema. My favourite kind of films: independent, low budget films about young women struggling to find their way in their lives. Sure, lots of people find this type of movie to be pretentious or full of cliches or whatever but they make sense to me. They are much more relevant to my life than big budget movies all about men. Some of them show a different viewpoint than the typical male gaze. These films seem to argue that women's stories are worth telling too. The white, heterosexual male isn't the only one with an interesting story worth telling. Sometimes I wish that I had studied film and spend all my time discussing movies like these.
First film I want to mention, Broken English. This is a beautiful film directed by Zoe Cassavetes, starring Parker Posey as a 30-ish woman working in a job she feels no connection for and trying to deal with her loneliness. Arguably, she does spend a lot of the film looking for love, however to me it didn't read as a desperate woman who needed a man, rather as a woman who is lonely. So lonely that she focused on looking for love as a way to combat this loneliness. It paints a beautiful portrait of a lonely woman in a dull job who just wants something special. There is an honesty to the story and to the emotion. The character of Nora isn't some dream girl or some ideal woman. She feels real. Her friendship with her best friend feels like a real friendship. And yes, it does have a romantic storyline but love is a part of life too. Broken English has real emotion but it is not a totally realistic movie. It is a sort of indie fantasy in some ways. But there is nothing wrong with a fantasy. Who doesn't want to change their life and run off to Paris every now and then?
Broken English is different than big budget Hollywood love story type movies that pop up so often. There is a sadness and loneliness undercurrent through the entire movie, even the happy parts, even the Paris section. It reminds me of the lonely feeling I get sometimes even when surrounded by other people. Life can be lonely, trying to figure it all out. And of course, Parker Posey is a phenomenal actress which she shows again here.
Nest up was Winter Passing. This film stars Zooey Deschanel as Reese, a young, struggling actress who returns to her dysfunctional home to visit her father after being offered a good chunk of money to publish letters written between her famous writer parents. Reese is kind of poor, does drugs and drinks a lot, and slams her hand in a drawer on purpose just to feel something. She does not have it together. Again, not some Hollywood fantasy type at all but rather an interesting, flawed character. In a lot of ways, Winter Passing reminded me of Garden State if its main character was female and there wasn't a romantic plot. Winter Passing is also about a struggling young person returning home following the death of their mother, with a father that they do not communicate with very well. Both meet some odd characters along the way who inadvertently help them learn to live. That said, I think I like Winter Passing even more. I like that there is no love story. Reese is having a hard time and it is not all fixed by falling in love. It isn't really all fixed at all. At the end she seems to be doing better, but we don't really know how much better. The movie is not devoid of cliches, but it does fare better than some. Reese's father and the strays he seems to have picked up are pretty unique and quirky. However, it does not seem to be a case of genius in their oddity. They just seem to be kind of strange. They all just seem to be weird because they have problems.
Zooey Deschanel is often typecast as a "manic pixie dreamgirl"-type but not here. Reese isn't anyone's dream. She is angry, sarcastic, numb, sad and a whole host of other characteristics. She isn't the two-dimensional free spirit archetype. She is a complete, multi-dimensional character with positive and negative characteristics. I love this movie. It has a complex female lead and does not rely on romantic cliches. I would consider it a must-see.
First film I want to mention, Broken English. This is a beautiful film directed by Zoe Cassavetes, starring Parker Posey as a 30-ish woman working in a job she feels no connection for and trying to deal with her loneliness. Arguably, she does spend a lot of the film looking for love, however to me it didn't read as a desperate woman who needed a man, rather as a woman who is lonely. So lonely that she focused on looking for love as a way to combat this loneliness. It paints a beautiful portrait of a lonely woman in a dull job who just wants something special. There is an honesty to the story and to the emotion. The character of Nora isn't some dream girl or some ideal woman. She feels real. Her friendship with her best friend feels like a real friendship. And yes, it does have a romantic storyline but love is a part of life too. Broken English has real emotion but it is not a totally realistic movie. It is a sort of indie fantasy in some ways. But there is nothing wrong with a fantasy. Who doesn't want to change their life and run off to Paris every now and then?
Broken English is different than big budget Hollywood love story type movies that pop up so often. There is a sadness and loneliness undercurrent through the entire movie, even the happy parts, even the Paris section. It reminds me of the lonely feeling I get sometimes even when surrounded by other people. Life can be lonely, trying to figure it all out. And of course, Parker Posey is a phenomenal actress which she shows again here.
Nest up was Winter Passing. This film stars Zooey Deschanel as Reese, a young, struggling actress who returns to her dysfunctional home to visit her father after being offered a good chunk of money to publish letters written between her famous writer parents. Reese is kind of poor, does drugs and drinks a lot, and slams her hand in a drawer on purpose just to feel something. She does not have it together. Again, not some Hollywood fantasy type at all but rather an interesting, flawed character. In a lot of ways, Winter Passing reminded me of Garden State if its main character was female and there wasn't a romantic plot. Winter Passing is also about a struggling young person returning home following the death of their mother, with a father that they do not communicate with very well. Both meet some odd characters along the way who inadvertently help them learn to live. That said, I think I like Winter Passing even more. I like that there is no love story. Reese is having a hard time and it is not all fixed by falling in love. It isn't really all fixed at all. At the end she seems to be doing better, but we don't really know how much better. The movie is not devoid of cliches, but it does fare better than some. Reese's father and the strays he seems to have picked up are pretty unique and quirky. However, it does not seem to be a case of genius in their oddity. They just seem to be kind of strange. They all just seem to be weird because they have problems.
Zooey Deschanel is often typecast as a "manic pixie dreamgirl"-type but not here. Reese isn't anyone's dream. She is angry, sarcastic, numb, sad and a whole host of other characteristics. She isn't the two-dimensional free spirit archetype. She is a complete, multi-dimensional character with positive and negative characteristics. I love this movie. It has a complex female lead and does not rely on romantic cliches. I would consider it a must-see.
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