Talking straight

Bruno gave me a new thought about homophobia. The straight people in the movie have just as many issues about their orientation and desires as anyone else. Homophobia,schmomophobia. America has a giant case of sex phobia. The bedroom is a bigger hang-up than it’s ever been. Gays just happen to be on the unfortunate side of the bed.

We’re all afraid of sex. Forty years of gay rights after the Stonewall Inn riots in New York have not moved sex forward. In fact,the more political being gay gets,the more afraid everyone gets of sex. So much for liberation..

Bruno is unlike anything the American multiplex has ever seen,with its raunchy acrobatic sex acts between the Bruno character and his fey Filipino lover. Bruno will make all the well-meaning homophobia seen in this decade’s movies seem like blips on the gaydar.

Here’s what happens when you are gay and stuck in your multiplex stadium seat. You laugh while measuring the laughs around you,like a human applause-o-meter. You watch everything with the extra awareness of how others are watching it,too. Some of us recall the audience squeals that met the kiss between Christopher Reeve and Michael Caine in Deathtrap in 1982. Those screams were almost matched when the effeminate art-student crawled into bed with an unsuspecting Vince Vaughn in The Wedding Crashers in 2005 and tried to seduce him.

There’s a whole lot of ironic understanding going on here. And the understanding is this: we’re all supposed to know that the filmmakers and movie stars whom we know and like are in fact not homophobic people,that this is all in good fun here,and this is why they still make fun of homosexuality as a flaw.

The credits roll,and you walk out of the theatre,wondering what just happened,wondering at the very least how come all the straight actors and filmmakers have the market cornered on gay jokes. What is Bruno going to teach us,other than sex is basically a total gross-out? You return to the world that exists outside of movie theatres,still a second-class American in a number of measurable ways.