Straight Skin, Gay Masks and Pretending to Be Gay on Screen
Straight Skin, Gay Masks and Pretending to Be Gay on Screen examines cinematic depictions of pretending-to-be-gay, assessing performances that not only reflect heteronormative and explicitly homophobic attitudes, but also offer depictions of gay selfhood with more nuanced multidirectional identifications.
The case of straight protagonists pretending to be gay on screen is the ideal context in which to study unanticipated progressivity and dissidence in regard to cultural construction of human sexualities in the face of theatricalized epistemological collapse. Teasing apart the dynamics of depictions of both sexual stability and fluidity in cinematic images of men pretending to be gay offers new insights into such salient issues as sexual vulnerability and dynamics and long-term queer visibility in a politically complicated mass culture which is mostly produced in a heteronormative and even hostile cultural environment. Additionally, this book initially examines queer uses of sexuality masquerade in Alternate Gay World Cinema that allegorically features a world pretending to be gay, in which straights are harassed and persecuted, in order to expose the tragic consequences of sexual intolerance. Films and TV series examined as part of the analysis include The Gay Deceivers, Victor/Victoria, Happy Texas , William Friedkins Cruising and many other straight and gay screens.
This is a fascinating and important study relevant to students and researchers in Film Studies, Media Studies, Gender Studies, Queer Studies, Sexuality Studies, Communication Studies and Cultural Studies.
Dr. Gilad Padva is a film, popular culture, mens studies and queer theory scholar. He is the author of Queer Nostalgia in Cinema and Pop Culture (2014) and co-editor of Sensational Pleasures in Cinema, Literature and Visual Culture: The Phallic Eye (2014), Intimate Relationships in Cinema, Literature and Visual Culture (2017) and Leisure and Cultural Change in Israeli Society (2020). He also publishes extensively in international academic journals, international collections and international encyclopedias. He currently teaches mens studies and popular culture at the Program for Women and Gender Studies with the NCJW at Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel.
Research in Sexualities
The Body in French Queer Thought from Wittig to Preciado
Queer Permeability
Elliot Evans
Straight Skin, Gay Masks and Pretending to be Gay on Screen
Gilad Padva
https://www.routledge.com/Research-in-Sexualities/book-series/RIS
Straight Skin, Gay Masks and Pretending to Be Gay on Screen
Gilad Padva
First published 2020
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2020 Gilad Padva
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Contents
I acknowledge that this book has been written in a particularly challenging time for me. Writing this book was a ray of light for me at the heart of darkness, shining in all colors of the rainbow. This project has given me new hopes, new insights, new ideas, new experiences and a new perspective on the place of sincerities, authenticities and reliabilities in our reality and psychic landscapes, as much as the immense power of voluntary and involuntary masquerades we use for daily survival, experimentation, development, erotic pleasures and better understanding of the Other inside and outside ourselves.
I am thankful to my family, friends, colleagues and mentors for their encouragement and sustained support. I am grateful to Professor Moshe Zuckermann, Professor Dafna Lemish, Professor Dafna Hacker (the Chair of the Program in Womens and Gender Studies with the NCJW at Tel Aviv University), and Dr. Elisabetta Girelli.
I am grateful to my devoted students whose insights and fresh ideas are always inspiring.
Im thankful to my Routledge editors, Alexandra McGregor and Eleanor Catchpole Simmons, for believing in this project. I deeply appreciate their creative cooperation, professionalism, collegiality and kindness.
The final stages of the production of this book are conducted in the shadow of the Coronavirus COVID-19 pandemic. My deepest sympathies go out to those who lost their love ones. My heart is with those who struggle every day with this disease under devastating personal and economic circumstances. I hope the world will soon overcome this catastrophe and its subsequent multiple violations of human rights. We all deserve wellbeing, freedom, sexual pluralism and, of course, fabulous masks and beautiful skin .
Why would a straight man want to pretend he is gay? Why would a man who belongs to the privileged majority wish to impersonate a member of a minority whose very identity (homo!, queer!, faggot!) is still considered offensive in the eyes of hundreds of millions of people in a highly intolerant and bigoted world? Why would a man, who is perceived as a hetero-masculine guy, want to be considered effeminate in a world in which flaming men are often subjected to daily harassment, abuse and degradation in their neighborhood, schoolyard, family, workplace and many social institutions (e.g., barracks, prisons and boarding schools)? In other words, why would a man wish to play it like a sissy, despite the devastating hardships that many gay men regularly experience?
In a popular 2011 episode of the Israeli TV satire show The Nations Situation (aka Matzav HaUmah ) (inspired by the American TV series Saturday Night Live ), the straight-identified Israeli TV star Guri Alfi performs the controversial Hebrew musical number Does It Make Me Gay?! the other participants at this entertainers panel look at him suspiciously. Alfi whispers, It doesnt mean anything The host comments in a sinister voice: That means a bit. Another of his colleagues, an openly lesbian comedian, nods affirmatively in solidarity with the hosts remark.
Alfi gets upset: You laugh at a friend, and its at my expense, and thats just He tearfully gets up from his seat and runs into the spotlight. His lesbian colleague whispers off screen, Wow! He is really offended! before Alfi starts singing melodramatically, pretending that he is a married guy who likes shopping with his wife, wearing fashionable sweaters, keeping on diets, obsessively working-out at the gym and whistling show tunes. The audience at the studio laughs out loud every time Alfi wonders, Does it make me gay?
