eveningsout

Behind 'enemy' lines, the landscape is too familiar

Ferocious Romance

What My Encounters with the Right Taught Me About Sex, God, and Fury by Donna Minkowitz

Free Press, $24 hardcover

Reviewed by Alistair McCartney

One of the primary lessons we are taught in "Gay and Lesbian 101" is that the religious right here in the United States is our cursed enemy, and that any red-blooded queer feels only fear or anger towards this blasted foe.

Donna Minkowitz, in her first book, takes a long, hard look at this given assumption, investigating the hidden points of similarity and affinity between these two supposedly absolute opposites. Straddling the ideological divide, she goes off in search of the shocking possibility that perhaps "we" really aren't all that different from "them."

A post-modern Mata Hari, she collects her evidence by moving effortlessly between the two warring parties, slipping in and out of drag, all the while taking notes, comparing and contrasting.

One week she's at a meeting of the Toronto Airport Christian Fellowship, which she calls "one of the most popular religious-right churches in the world," posing as an anonymous someone who more than anything desires to get a taste of the holy spirit and be born again. The next week she's back on her own turf, kicking it with a bunch of queertheory academics at an NYU Law School meeting of Sex Panic, the group who holds above anything else the unequivocal right to desire.

In one chapter, breasts bound and bearing a fake mustache, she infiltrates the ranks of a Promise Keepers rally, "the Christian right group that makes men see God."

Sweating in a Florida stadium along with fifty thousand presumably real men, she heads for the exit as soon as her simulation of teenage male facial hair begins to melt in the harsh sunlight. In a later chapter, she blindly perspires with her sister-strangers in the pitchblack of a lesbian back room.

One moment she's a total (if unwilling)

femme in a floral dress at a gathering of "makeup evangelists" Grace 'n' Vessels, whose specialty is “salvation and accessorizing tips,” the next moment she's herself again, a butch dyke in full leather regalia at an S/M workshop.

All her adventures, rendered in elegant

HONESTLY ETHEL by John D. Anderson

AND THIS IS MY BARBRA

LAMP THAT

OH! SHE OH NO! 15 30 THEY'RE IMPECCGOING TO

SHE DESIGNED. ABLE! TALK ABOUT

STREISAND AGAIN!

REMEMBER HER IN CONCERT? AND SHE WAS SO GORGEOUS! AGING SO WELL!

I'VE GOT TO

CHANGE THE SUBJECT OR THEY'LL KEEP GOING FOR HOURS

and incisive prose, makes for a thoughtful and entertaining read.

The findings Minkowitz comes up with again and again, throughout her escapades, is the almost uncanny resemblance each group bears to the other. The salvation ethos and heady enthusiasm of these churches reminds her of gay liberation rallies, and the fervent giddiness that accompanies one's "coming out" S/M ritual is riddled for her with (somewhat esoteric) notions of "godhead" and "the sacred."

Even more provocative is the implicit eroticism of many of these right-wing religious ceremonies that she renders explicit:

"Somehow, in a religious movement notably dedicated to the suppression of female and gay and lesbian sexuality, one of the most common religious rites involves women writhing on the floor with their arms around each other, shaking uncontrollably as they beg each other to be 'melted,' " Minkowitz writes.

Digging up the endearing contradictions embedded in the scariest religious dogmas, she finds herself, God forbid, enjoying these forays into the right wing. Sometimes her laughter is of the "laughing at them" kind. Her rollicking descriptions of the more colorful quarters of the religious-right are a gas, full of dry and wicked humor. Referring to one of the makeover-preacher's homilies:

66 6

"... And I heard God say to me: You will never drown. The floods will never drown you.' Listening to her, I rather wish they had."

But more often than not, against her better judgment, she ends up laughing with them. Her preconceived suspicions of these groups as nothing but body-denying and fag-hating nuts is challenged, as she finds herself in the midst of proceedings getting turned on and feeling authentically moved.

The implications of these surprising discoveries could have been profound, both philosophically and politically, but more often as I read I felt disturbed and disappointed. What promised to be a rigorous rethinking of humanist categories of “self” and “other”

ends up soaked in tepid new-age notions.

Leapfrogging across her thesis, she locates the source of real otherness, not in the religious right, but inside herself:

"The tight-lipped prig inside me is directly connected to the exhibitionistic trollop," and "For everything I had fled from was a part of me. And all I had run after was a part of me."

This is potentially interesting, but I had no idea how she came to these rather neat and hurried conclusions, beliefs that seem as generalized as the binary set of assumptions she originally set out to demolish. Minkowitz comes off sounding like the journalistic equivalent of Sinead O'Connor singing, "The whole time, I failed to see, all I need was inside me."

"Disarmed" of all ideological weaponry as she approached various strands of the right, she lands not in radical new way of thinking, but in an ideological vacuum. Held in her all too cheerful embrace, these individuals who she formerly viewed as monsters, are, after all, simply “people who need people." But I wasn't convinced by her humanizing efforts, which struck me as an undertaker's attempts to make the dead look more attractive by slapping on layers of makeup. Out of strategic necessity, my impression of the religious-right is still that they are not lovable eccentrics, but spiritual and aesthetic freaks, kitschy and dangerous.

Even more puzzling to me is why even try and humanize a group who, whatever way you put it, continue to classify queers as existing on the outskirts of humanity?

Minkowitz's Cheshire cat stance, ethically evasive but always smiling, though very attractive, ultimately undermines her project. The ambivalence that she never forgot to pack in her luggage, accompanying her on all her trips, ends up being infectious. I was left feeling as conflicted about her book as she was about her own experience.

Alistair McCartney lives in Los Angeles, where he is currently working on his first novel, tentatively titled T/Here.

Four Whale films to be shown in monster series

SAY, DID I EVER TELL YOU TWO ABOUT THE FUNNY THING THAT HAPPENED TO ME ON THE WAY...

E-Mail: ETHEL COMIX@AOL.COM

SPEAKING OF FUNNY, REMEMBER IN FUNNY GIRL WHEN BABS SANG OH YES! SHE WAS EXQUISITE

MY MAN?

SIGHHH...

Cleveland-Horror is one if the genres that defined Universal Pictures in the '30s and '40s, and the studio's "franchise" monsters include Frankenstein, Dracula, the Wolf Man, and the Mummy.

All are represented in the "Universal Horror" film series June 4-6 at the Cleveland Cinematheque, along with the actors (Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi, Lon Chaney, Jr.) who won immortality portraying them.

The series also features Colin Clive, Dwight Frye, Elsa Lanchester, Bud Abbot and Lou Costello. All 11 films will be screened in 35mm prints ten of them new.

June 5 will be "James Whale Night,” with the screenings of four funny/scary gems by the late gay director who was the subject of the recent Oscar-winning film Gods and Monsters. The films will be divided into five double features and one single bill, and will run on

Friday, Saturday, and Sunday night only.

The Cleveland Cinematheque is located at the Cleveland Institute of Art, 11141 East Boulevard in University Circle.

Admission to each program is $6, or $10 for two programs on the same night. Kids 12 and under are $3. There is free parking in the adjacent Institute lot.

This is the first and only Ohio showing of this touring series. For a complete schedule, contact the Cinematheque at 216-421-7450.