CommuniKate

This morning in Ptown, I actually had goose bumps. The days are cooler; sunsets are earlier. What can you do?

What we have been doing all summer is having Feminist Classics Readings every Saturday night at nine p.m. on Commercial Street between our wonderful City Video store and Spiritus.

The idea started simply enough. My galpal told visiting friends she was reading the re-issue of Simone DeBeauvoir’s The Second Sex. A laconic, ironic friend from South Carolina suggested we do dramatic readings from it on the street. My galpal of course wanted to do a marathon reading of the whole thing. We worried it could go into early November.

We started simply. We brought some classics – Adrienne Rich, Mary Daly, Audre Lourde, Judith Butler – and classic collections The Lesbian Reader, The Butch Femme Reader and poetry collections. We read short selections, standing on the white wrought iron chair in front of an ATM. We invited passersby to pick something to read. We filmed the readings with a flip-cam. Volunteers held up our 8X10 sign handmade by Vanessa from the video store.

As the Saturdays went on, people brought their own favorite classics. There were regulars. Women read. Men read. Crowds gathered to see what was happening, stayed or walked on. There was one hook-up, that we know of. One night, twenty-one different readers read the twenty-one love poems of Adrienne Rich. Another night, a seven-year-old girl sang “You Are My Sunshine.” During Bear Week, we read excerpts from “The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm.” Bears sitting on the curb at Spiritus listened curiously and munched contentedly.

It’s a happening. And a gathering. Last week the official town crier lent his stentorian voice to the proceedings. A violinist gave musical accompaniment to some poems. Young standout readers gave gripping interpretations of the words so many of us grew up on.

As the summer winds down, we encourage others to start readings in their own hometowns. Once a month outside the farmer’s market, a local coffee spot or gathering place. We’re thinking of something at Lincoln Center. Keep it simple. It creates its own complexities.

This Saturday, I plan to read Gloria Steinem’s classic, “If Men Could Menstruate.”

Unlike past summer films featuring Spiderman, Iron Man, or X-Man, this summer’s leading movie man is the XY-Man, the sperm donor. In The Kids Are Alright Mark Ruffalo plays the sperm donor tracked down by the children of two lesbians played by Annette Bening and Julianne Moore. The lesbians finally reject the sperm donor from the tight egg of their family. In The Switch originally called The Baster, Jason Bateman plays an accidental sperm donor who meets himself seven years later in the son of a single mom, played by Jennifer Aniston.

According to my purely vanilla extracted film survey, sperm have of course already been featured in film.

In the 1972 Woody Allen film Everything You Wanted to Know About Sex But Were Too Afraid to Ask, the answer to the question, “What happens during ejaculation?” features an ensemble cast of sperm. Allen plays a nervous, nerdy sperm fearful of ending up on the ceiling. The hilariously mechanistic explanation of ejaculation should be extra credit viewing in abstinence-only sex education programs.

In the 1983 Monty Python film The Meaning of Life, sperm merit a catchy musical treatment. The father of sixty-three children sings “Every Sperm is Sacred” as his kids are being marched off to an orphanage. He belts out a rousing West End rendition: “Every sperm is sacred. Every sperm is great. And when a sperm is wasted, God gets quite irate.” I recovered from the song just in time for the one-tiny-dinner-mint scene.

And of course men have always been essentialist sperm-donors, but as we’ve seen this summer, the purpose and centrality of that function has shifted with the increased agency of women. Call it choice. It is a profound shift. Why now? Certainly technological advances in artificial insemination, improved in vitro imaging and other sciency things are important. But feminism, Title IX, changing employment patterns, increase in single mothers, and gay activism with its redefinition of marriage and family are all cultural forces in this shift. When the sperm donor is not the central focus of movies about women the shift will truly be a seismic.

We’ll save for another time the discussion of Salt. The leading role of murderous, macho man was written for Tom Cruise. The role was eventually played by the incredibly fertile Angelina Jolie. In my experience it beats male porn.

On Sunday night, my galpal and I joined a sold-out crowd of moviegoers to see the much-anticipated The Kids Are Alright at the tiny Ptown Theater. The a.c. was a bonus.

The crowd at the early show was mostly Well of Loneliness era women in pairs and posses. Quite frankly, I was looking forward to seeing Annette Benning (love her) and Julianne Moore getting it on. A lot. My biggest worry before the movie was that one of the lesbians goes straight. That should have been the least of my worries.

The film is wonderfully acted and expertly shot but for me that didn’t make up for the story line that seemed more conventional because I was sitting next to the unconventional John Waters. He thought it was a decent sitcom. My other seatmate started fidgeting, then harrumphing and finally yelling on the bike ride home, “For this we waited in line? And for thirty years? I’m a lesbian and I hated that movie.” A woman on the street stopped her and said she hated it too and sent her:https://bullybloggers.wordpress.com/2010/07/15/
the-kids-arent-alright/

Since I have friends who are filmmakers, writers and directors, and know what they have to go through to get anything made and distributed, I am not an immediate critic of the movie I’ve just seen. I appreciate that it even exists for a few hours and then I get critical.

So I’m glad that Lisa Cholodenko got her film made. But the film got made because it did not rock anyone’s world or challenge any racial or gender stereotypes. The only good sex with skin was straight. Long-term same-sex coupling and parenting was shown to be just like as same-old-sex coupling and parenting. The lesbians were of course virtually sexless. Mothering is smothering. Even absent fathers do it better. Despite a CA-CODA-speak script, everyone was on an AlAnon slip. Women, even lesbians, fall for guys just because. Because they watch gay male porn? Try The L-Word. The portrayal of people of color was annoying. The kids would really be alright if they went to a COLAGE meeting, Children of Lesbians and Gays Everywhere.

If TKAA pissed you off, I recommend Angelina Jolie in Salt. Pretend she’s a lesbian.