The Norsemen: Do You Want a Simpering, Backstabbing, Cowardly Sissy-Man as Your Chieftain?

The Norsemen )Vikingane)  is Monte Python light, finding humor in the incongruity of modern sensibility in Viking times:   "You can't go on the raid, we have a couple's night planned."

It's filmed in a replica of a Viking-Age farm in  Avaldsnes, Norway, usng authetic costumes and implements.  The actors  film every scene twice, first in Norwegian and then in English.  Their accents range from mild to nearly incomprehensible.  This makes the modern references evern more humorous ("Find your bliss!")

It's  quite plot-heavy; if you miss an episode, you're sunk.

1. The Vikings of Norheim pay tribute to the evil, powerful Jarl Varg.  When they discover a map to a new territory in the West (England), he schemes to get his hands on it.

2. When Chieftain Olav is murdered, his brother Orm (left) takes over, even though he's unqualified, having never been on a raid before because he's a weakling and a coward.  He's also gay.

Not open, andwhen he's accused, he denies it, but he has homoerotic drawings and dildos in his bedroom, he won't sleep with his wife, and when he is raped by one of Jarl Varg's men (while dressed as a woman for a play), he enjoys it.  He explains that according to Viking law, only the passive partner counts as "homosexual," so he tried to be as energetic as possible.

So a weak, cowardly, sneaky, underhanded, potential fratricide is gay but in denial?  I don't like that at all.  I don't care if Viking times were homophobic.  They could have made Orm a great warrior, not a sniveling pansy stereotype.  At least he doesn't lisp, and he was only shown sewing in the first scene.

2. Rufus (left), a captured Roman slave, regales Orm with stories of the pansexual  orgies he used to attend (but when he fantasizes about them himself, the players are all women).

None of the Vikings have ever heard of acting, so Rufus talks them into building a theater and letting him put on a play.  He wants to make Norheim the cultural capital of  the North.

Later, Rufus, Orm, and one of the women become outlaws.  I don't think they become lovers.

3. Arvid (left), a great warrior, wins a farm  by challenging its owner to combat, but he dislikes Liv, the wife he gets as part of the deal; she is into "feelings," and he'd rather be out pillaging.  He also apparently has affairs with Chieftain Olav's wife Hildur and Orm's wife  Frøya.

I had to check wikipedia. I can't tell the women apart.  Except Froya, who goes on raids, rapes men, and then cuts off their penis as a souvenir (she wears a chain of them arund her neck).

When Orm is disgraced and forced to flee the village, Arvid becomes chieftain.

There are many other named characters who have little snippets of plot:

1. Kark, a slave who earned his freedom but decided to stay on as a slave ("there's no greater joy than doing backbreaking work for no money)

2. Orn (top photo), who insists on sitting next to his best friend Ragnar during raids.

3.  Sturla Bonecrusher (left), hired as Rufus' assistant/bodyguard when he's working on the theater project. When Rufus tells him to "discipline" a recalcitrant worker, he knocks the guy's head off.  Literally.

Not much beefcake, on or off camera.  Rufus gets the only significant shirtless/bulge exposure.

And the blatant, blatant homophobia is a major turn-off.  I keep hoping for Orm to be redeemed, but throughout Season 1 he just keeps getting worse. Then I keep checking to see if Norway happens to be a homophobic country, but apparently not. So WTF?

Fall 1982: Dancer from the Dance: Gay Ghetto by Andrew Holleran

When I started grad school in Bloomington, Indiana in 1982, I had no trouble finding gay books.  There were no gay sections in the campus bookstore or the White Rabbit downtown, but you could just scan the shelves for titles that were dark and sinister, about secrets and lies and despair, like Yukio Mishima's Confessions of a Mask or Tennessee Williams' A Thirsty Evil.

But one day I stumbled upon one that didn't use code: Dancer from the Dance (1978), by Andrew Holleran, with a shirtless guy wrapped in a yuppie sweater on the cover (he looked like Perry King, bottom photo).  The blurb that yelled: "A haunting novel of romance and decadence in the fast lanes of gay society!"

Wow, no secrets, no lies, no despair!  Maybe even a gay man who experiences a moment or two of happiness, and doesn't die at the end.

No such luck.

The gay men in Dancer from the Dance are all young, beautiful, wealthy, and cursed. They trudge from gym to bar to after-hours club to bathhouse, dancing, taking drugs, having sex, seeing the same faces year after year, but knowing nothing about them except their penis size. They have dozens of lovers but no friends.  They are unable to find any meaning in life, or any happiness.

Every summer they are bussed from the Village to Fire Island, from one prison to another, and they peer out the windows at Sayville, with its husbands and wives sitting contented on porches while kids frolick in front yards, and they think "That's happiness!  But we can never experience it, because we're gay, and therefore doomed."

As one of the characters explains: "The world demands that gay life be ultimately sad, for everyone in this country believes. . .that to be happy you must have a two-story house in the suburbs and a FAMILY."  Andrew Holleran not excluded.

The main character, Malone, vanishes at the end of the novel.  Sex/dance partners are always vanishing.   Some escape, like the character who moves to the Deep South and finds infinite joy in helping a friend install a septic tank.  Others die.  The rest keep on dancing.

Very depressing take on the gay world.  Yet I wasn't depressed, because I knew something that Malone and his coterie didn't: the men they saw day after day, year after year were, in fact, a FAMILY, an adhesive brotherhood that could change the world.

See also: The Violet Quill

How Proust Can Bore You to Death

I have a confession to make: I have a B.A. in Modern Languages, a M.A. in English, and almost a doctorate in Comparative Literature, and I've never made it through more than a few pages of Proust's  Remembrance of Things Past.

I know I should.  It's an essential work of French literature, and an essential part of the gay literary heritage.  A gay writer, with gay characters, published during the 1920s.

I used to own the hefty Motcrieff translation, plus the first volume in French. Now I have it on an ebook.

Seven volumes, 4,200 pages, and you have to read each page several times because your mind keeps wandering.

The narrator as a young boy is in his bedroom, waiting for his mother to come upstairs and kiss him goodnight.  Then, as an adult, he eats a madeleine pastry, and memories come rushing back.  He used to live in a town named Combray...

 And I thrust the book aside.  Or, lately, I click it off my computer screen.

I've read books about it: How Proust Can Change Your Life, Proust's Library, Painting in Proust, Food in Proust.  

And I pick it up and start again.








2,000 characters, mostly divided into four camps:

The Swanns: An upper-class family.  Charles Swann marries the courtesan Odette.  The Narrator dates their daughter, Gilberte.

The Guermantes: Aristocrats that the Narrator envies. The flamboyant, decadent Baron de Charlus is the most important.

The Verdurins: mostly artists.

The Balbec Girls.  To my disappointment, Balbec does not refer to the ancient Middle Eastern city, but to yet another French provincial town, where the Narrator meets Albertine, the great love of his life.

Yawn.  Is there anything on tv?

I bought the graphic novel version, and still didn't make it past the first few pages.  So...so...sooooo...boring....



Can anyone claim to be knowledgeable about gay literature without having read Proust?

Probably.  There are thousands and thousands of pages of hetero-romance.  We don't get to the gay stuff until Volume 4, Sodom et Gomorrah, translated as The Cities of the Plain.when the Narrator discovers that Baron Charlus is gay and that some of the women he is attracted to are lesbians.  This upsets him, because it means that they are not sexually accessible.

Some critics think that the Narrator is gay, too, because he keeps falling in love with women who have masculine-sounding names: Albertine could be a closeted "Albert," and Gilberte could be "Gilbert."  But that sounds like grasping at straws.

By the way, the top photo is a bodybuilder because when you search for "Remembrance of Things Past" on Google Images, he pops up.

Someone must have decided to post a bodybuilder on their Proust page, to alleviate the boredom.

My Crush on Bazooka Joe

Ok, I admit it.  When I was a kid in the 1960s, I had a little crush on Bazooka Joe.

Bazooka Gum consisted of an individually-wrapped, pillow-shaped square of Pepto-Bismol-colored bubble gum.  You could buy five of them for a nickel at Dewey's Candy Store, across the street from my grade school.  I wasn't a big fan of the gum, but I liked the wraparound comic, about 1.5 x 1", starring a blond boy named Bazooka Joe and his friends.

You can't do a lot of characterization or plotting in 3 or 4 tiny panels and less than 50 words, so the stories were minimal, usually setups for lame jokes or gags.  But none of the setups involved dating or romance; sometimes Joe was shown with a girl, but no doubt she was his sister.





You can't do a lot of detailed drawing in 3 tiny panels, but the artist somehow managed to make Joe a hunk, with a tight, spare frame.  Notice the second panel, where slightly curved lines suggest a rounded shoulder and bicep-bulge.  That took forethought.

His name, Bazooka: a big gun, powerful and dangerous.

His eye patch: he'd lost an eye, like Popeye or a secret agent.  No doubt in a fight with a villain.  No doubt he also had Popeye's superheroic strength.  Perfect for a gay-coded "my hero" rescue!

Muscle, power, danger, everything you want in a fantasy boyfriend, all in a 1-inch throwaway comic!

Turns out I got Bazooka Joe all wrong.  His artist, Wesley Morse, is mostly famous for drawing leggy dames in strips like Kitty of the Chorus and Frolicky Fables, not to mention a series of x-rated porn comics called "Tijuana Bibles."  He wasn't deliberately trying to draw Bazooka Joe as the object of an eight-year old's romantic fantasy.

Bazooka Joe hadn't really lost an eye: he wore the eye patch in a parody of a series of once-popular magazine ads about "The Man in the Hathaway Shirt."

And he did have a girlfriend; I just missed the strips involving heterosexual dating and romance.

The strips appeared in Bazooka Gum for over 50 years, making Bazooka Joe the most recognizable candy mascot in the world.  He has been referenced on Seinfeld, 30 Rock, and Mad Men,  and there is a professional wrestler who calls himself Bazooka Joe (top photo).