Dennis van Vreden/finalessay

“People can’t believe that I would take the position that I take and actually mean it, so they assume that I’m being ironic. And quite often I’m not, I suppose.”
Bruce La Bruce


The biggest thing in writing, researching and discussing the theme of How Media Effects Us is that the majority of people are not aware of the effect while it is affecting them. Therefore the first message would be, and is seconded by essayist Rob Riemen (2010), that massmedia should no longer be blatantly interpreted as truth. Riemen speaks about mass-society, a name given to society by Ortega y Gasset in 1930. “A society that, according to early suspicions from Goethe and with all of the features that Tocqueville and Nietzsche had predicted, is indeed manifesting itself all over Europe.” Riemen writes that Europe is on the verge of being a free society (more specifically in this society, he states that media is broadening our view of the world). But that this great moment of history is being rejected by this massamens (literally translates to masshuman). This massamens, he so describes, is found in all classes, rich and poor, literate and illiterate. Riemen (2010, p.16) quotes Gasset calling it a “threat of the values and ideals of the liberal democracy and European humanism; traditions where the spiritual and moral development of the free individual is the fundament for a free and open society.” The terrifying part about the massamens is that he thinks he is always right without required arguments. Non-massamens have to adjust to him and “in the language of reason, he knows only one language, the language of the body: violence” (even more so, everything that is not part of this mass, cannot exist). Now what happens with the media here is also a reflection of the massamens. Massmedia is created, feeding the massamens, for he does not think. (2010, p.17) “He is free of all spiritual effort. He adjusts to the mass - with for his look the current fashion and his opinion the massmedia as his aids to guide him through life.”

Another worrying fact about this, is that the wiser and intellectuals of society are ignoring the fact that people believe the things in massmedia. And that is the biggest mistake ever. That this even happened inside the subculture is beyond me. In the documentary Paragraph 175 (2000), where several homosexual survivors (specifically persecuted for being homosexual) of the second World War are also speaking about the mood in Germany during the years that the Nazi Party became the only legal party. They would laugh at Hitler at first, thinking: "Who would go for this man and his promises." Within these years Hitler and his party quickly had achieved total control over all media.

Identity
Paragraph 175 shows wonderful images from the 1920s and 30s when Berlin was thriving as a homosexual capital. Even though the law against homosexual acts was there, it was ignored in Berlin. Until now I had always believed that the coming of the Nazi Party had single handedly crushed all research and development on homosexuality and homosexual communities, but there was another thing happening in Hollywood under the influence of the Catholic church. It started when Hollywood made an attempt to please their viewers who were starting to get offended by the homosexual content by agreeing to the Hayes code, a voluntary self-censorship. However, in 1934 the Catholic church had created a way to rate movies with A; Acceptable, B; Morally Objectionable and C; Condemned. They threatened massive boycotts if content was not adjusted and Hollywood promised to stay clean to their terms. On the restriction list there was: Open-mouthed kissing, lustful embraces, sex perversion, seduction, rape, abortion, prostitution and white slavery, nudity, obscenity, profanity. To direct this code, Joseph Breen was given the responsibility to read all scripts and screenplays and rewrite everything that was not according to the new code. He continued to do this for two decades.

“A novel on a sexually confused alcoholic writer became a movie about an alcoholic writer with a writers block in The Lost Weekend, 1945. A novel about gay bashing and murder became a movie about anti-semitism and murder in Crossfire, 1947.” The Celluloid Closet, 1995, documentary. The documentary opens with: ”Homosexuality has been rarely seen on the screen over the last hundred years. When it was, it was there as something to laugh at, or something to pity and even as something to fear. These fleeting images were unforgettable and left a lasting legacy. Hollywood, the great maker of myths, taught straight people what to think about gay people and gay people what to think about themselves.”

What happened after, what I will now mention simply as, the Breen Code was that homosexuals didn’t completely get erased from the screen, but were cleverly hidden. What became clear from the movie The Vampire’s Daughter (1936) was that homosexuals were now given the identity of a cold blooded villain, a vampire. At first the homosexuality was barely noticeable, but through smart actors it came back on the way they looked at each other or the often used oriental music that would be played when two men would have a conversation or when a man would enter the room.

Writer Susie Bright makes a very true remark. “When you are watching a movie as a gay audience. It’s amazing how you will watch an entire movie just to see if somebody is wearing an outfit that you think means that they’re a homosexual. The whole movie can be a dud, but you’re just sitting there waiting for Joan Crawford to put on her black cowboy shirt again. (Joan Crawford in The Black Guitar, 1954” (The Celluloid Closet). I think this one quote really sums up homosexuals around this time until today where gay roles might be played the same in some media, but at least it is openly talked about, instead of just being suggested.

Contemporary Behaviour
Let us make the time switch to today. In an article in UK’s The Guardian (2011) called “Straight men kissing more”, Lucy Tobin talks about the research of Eric Anderson who did a PhD on “the intersection of sport, masculinities and declining homophobia”. “Anderson, 43, now believes homophobia is dying out on university campuses, and says attitudes to male kissing reflect that. “Sexual minorities have made tremendous cultural and legal improvements towards equality - the media is saturated with images of sexual minorities, and homosexuality is almost normalized today,” he says.” Also stating that the young people in these universities “have disassociated themselves from homophobia the way they once did from racism.” An interesting term comes up in this article called homohysteria. It’s pointing out that of course not all youth are gay-friendly, but that it is about the awareness about the authenticity of being homosexual. Homosexuality here is gaining its authentic features. There no longer has to be homohysteria, “where men try to act in sexist, hyper-macho and homophobic ways to prove they are not gay”. To me homohysteria is in its highest peak during college. That knowledge is not just from my own experience, but also seen in the huge cultural movement called “It Gets Better” that is today’s biggest and most effective homosexual awareness method. Where young homosexuals create personal videos on Youtube telling their college experiences as being daily victims of bullying and a huge chain of reaction videos that were made after the news of 4 young homosexual teenagers committing suicide in their desperate situation. These It Gets Better clips on youtube transcend the subculture and are about life as a homosexual within general society.

Paradox
My observation is that homosexual artists work paradoxically. Two things always seem to contradict each other but remain true. This might be a true product of subculture. The result of it not fitting in with the norm, therefore it would always have a paradoxical tension with it (this is very obvious with Bruce La Bruce who I will mention in a moment). I compare this to a political campaign. I don’t think you work with a paradox in politics. You are fighting for justice and there is no paradox in justice. The paradox would lie in politics itself, finding a balance in what is justice and dividing the finances.

A homosexual artist that was fueled by paradox was Andy Warhol. His work with film is both a glorification of celebrity culture, but at the same time he’s mocking it by showing how easily it seems to be created. In his Screentests he wants to catch a series of personalities on film. He basically puts the most beautiful people in front of the camera, gives them some nice lighting and let them stare into the lens. You almost feel stupid watching these since nothing is happening, but the faces are so intriguingly beautiful and interesting. What I also find interesting about Andy’s point of view is that gender is fading in his work. It is about people, about time and about culture. Life was about the party, but was it really as glorious as it seems.

This paradox also comes back in the pages of, what I now consider to be the epitome of gay subculture, BUTT BOOK (2006). BUTT BOOK contains an edited selection of the most fantastic interviews and photos that appeared in BUTT magazine over the time of 5 years since it’s first issue in the summer of 2001. On the front cover the subtitle reads “Adventures in 21st century gay subculture”. An interesting thing I want to point out is that BUTT magazine can be found in almost every bookstore, but in the art section. Now why is it in the art section? It contains photography, yes, but it is very much about culture, about life. You can say that its design is very particular compared to other magazines that are about life’s questions and issues, but that says more about all the others than about BUTT.

I’m looking at Bruce La Bruce’s (2004) work. We can use the Breen Code as our vantage point to review his piece of work here. In the Raspberry Reich we see two men heavily kissing, making out, all over a busy street in the city of Berlin. We see one woman repulsively reacting, but the men keep doing what they’re doing. By what I know now about Hollywood’s boundaries from the 30s it seems almost inevitable that this work from Bruce La Bruce is a direct result of that. He takes his film to real issues, showing our life does not compare to the Hollywood movies. He is showing us the opposite image of the Hollywood version of the homosexual. Not the cold blooded, chin-up and eyes towards the horizon type, but the open mouthed kissing men. We now have two images, one is cold and introverted, the other is aggressive and throwing his tongue at another man. He deliberately created the furthest counter image. But that was not just with Bruce La Bruce. In an interview with BUTT (2006, p.208-217) Bruce says:“... there has to be a sexual revolution before there can be any sort of social or political revolution”. In this same interview La Bruce also talks about the punk and neo-nazi period that homosexuals went through. This influence is very obvious in La Bruce’s work. Where he basically created aggressive porn scenes where everyone is dressed up in full neo-nazi outfit with shaved heads, having sex in places with graffiti on the walls. These things seem quite far from our average daily life.

To return to BUTT once more, I scanned (p.218-223) six consecutive pages in the book that perfectly show the contradiction. The family portrait, which is conveniently set in the country, and the homo-erotic photographs, set in a closed, bedroom-like, room. The two would never seem to mix but only inside this one man.

Concluding
The subculture will always remain a subculture. It is the opposition of mass-society. It is a political system of the human spirit. To focus on gay subcultural media in our age. I would point out first that it seems to have two sides, a silent more passive and an active (maybe even aggressive) side. Both, I believe, to be influenced, maybe even created, by the massmedia. I believe, that after watching what happened during the 30s and 40s, the influence is much more clear now. The active one being more obviously influenced of course, the other seeming to be more of a separate world. It seems to be that one side is more content in staying a subculture and the other is fighting for revolution, a change in the mass-society.

Bibliography:
Riemen, R. (2008) Nobility of Spirit
Riemen, R. (2010) De Eeuwige Terugkeer van het Fascisme
Jonkers, G. and Bennekom, J. (2006) BUTT Book
Angell, C. (2006) Andy Warhol Screentests, The films of Andy Warhol catalogue raisonne
Straight men kissing more, Lucy Tobin, The Guardian, January 4th 2011

Filmography:
Paragraph 175 (2000) documentary by K. Müller
The Celluloid Closet (1995) documentary by R. Epstein and J. Friedman
The Raspberry Reich (2004) written and directed by B. La Bruce
V for Vendetta (2006) directed by J. McTeigue
I Shot Andy Warhol (1996) directed by Mary Harron