Rent

My girl loved Rent but my girl loves musicals of all strips and flavors so it's no real surprise. Me on the other hand? I did not dig it so much. As a piece of art I can respect it and appreciate what it was trying to do and say but for my money they sang too damn much. Can't you people ever just have a normal conversation? Do you really have to break into song that much?

Also looking at this piece of art I can be horrified that a good chunk of the characters and plot were taken almost directly from lesbian writer Sarah Schulman's novel People in Trouble. The most horrifying part of it is that the parts "borrowed" by Rent were stories from her own life that she included in the novel. Except Rent turned a lesbian's affair with a married woman into a married straight man having an affair with a straight woman. Swell.

Do some research on this issue and see how shitty it is that Schulman made not a penny off of Rent even though the Larson estate as much as admitted that a good portion of it was taken from Schulman's novel. The issue seems to be that you can copyright word until the cows come home but you can't copyright characters and plot points. OK fine but I can't be the only one who thinks it's disgusting that of the millions and millions Rent has made Schulman hasn't been compensated at all for her novel being the basis for a lot of it.

In addition to my being horrified at the excessive singing in Rent and the plagarism angle I'm endlessly fascinated by how straight audiences seem to love the gay people in Rent but hate us in real life. Last night B and I went the Indianapolis Symphany Orchestra's Yuletide Celebration. It's a big musical extravaganze that was hosted by the whitest gospel singer you've ever met in your life. About 3/4 into the show she came out and gave a speech about how this season is a season of faith for her, a season of hope for others and for others still it was a season of love. You see where this is going don't you? Then she said that her kids were very excited that she was participating in the Yuletide Celebration this year because of the inclusion of...(wait for it)...Seasons of Love. The crowd went wild and loved the multi-cultural cast singing the most well known song from Rent. Do you think most people in that audience would welcome a multi-cultural group of gay carolers into their homes for hot chocolate? I don't.

And when we saw Rent in the theater the majority of the audience was made up of teenagers. White as they come, obnoxious as they come, stereotypical teenagers. There was no heckling or hissing at any of the scenes or topics in the movie. But if the second string quarterback took his boyfriend to the prom do you think they'd all be super supportive? I don't. But if I'm going to be wrong in either case I think it could be this one. Teenagers seem to be a lot more accepting and supportive than they were even ten years ago when I was in school. OK 12 years ago. Fuck I'm old.

So I've been thinking about what makes Rent so palatable to straight people. I haven't come up with many answers. What I can come up with is why it doesn't automatically scare the het crowd away:

1) In the movie version at least (I never saw the stage version) the gay men are basically neutored. You never see any sexual contact between the main male couple. The most you get is a relatively chaste kiss.

2) One half of the gay male couple is a queen that can basically pass in any situation. When he becomes a she, at least on screen, it's perfectly easy to squint your eyes and pretend it's a man and a woman. Because that's why gay people do anyway isn't it? One partner plays the man and the other plays the woman?

3) Lesbians don't scare anyone. Thank the partriarchy for that one. Woman by and large aren't threatening and the idea of two hot woman getting it on excites a good chunk of the straight male population. But let one half of the lesbian couple be a butch plumber or an androgynous pretty girl who passes for an adrogynous pretty boy and see how quickly it becomes distatestful to most.

4) No one faces any homophobia (direct or indirect that I can recall). See? All this talk about homophobia and gay bashing is just nonsense. Look at these happy home

5) The queen dies. The straight people who contracted HIV from drugs live to see another day but the beautiful, flamoboyant queen who we are to believe got sick because he had sex with other men is the only one to see the inside of a casket.

6. Queers singing songs aren't nearly as scary as queers dating or having sex.

The vast straight audience likes us when we aren't real, when we are non-threatening, when we're dead and when we're non-sexual. When we only exist as non-threatening charictures instead of real people it's easy to forget how vast and varied we are and ignore how many of our brothers and sisters still struggle with being accepted for who they are.

P.S. I'm back.