For those of us who remember the greatest film star of them all, Miss Greta Garbo (I have most of her films on video, and I even now consider her luminous presence on the screen unparalleled by any current star, male or female), it will be interesting to read the presumably passionate love letters (to be published in the spring of 2000) she wrote to a female screenwriter who was an out-and-about known lesbian.
I always knew she was gay, as did most cognoscenti of the film world. There were so many gay women in "Hollywood" (a genre, more than a town) who passed for straight, as there were men, that I am always delighted when the truth finally comes out.
What idiot could have missed the mannerisms Garbo employed in her screen interpretation of Sweden's "mysterious" Queen Cristina? Garbo was a great actress, but that Queen was no act!
Many inconstant heterosexuals who adored Garbo will doubtless turn on her memory now that she has been "outed," but who gives a shit? Like Richard Burton in the current flap in Wales about his being a closet queen and fucking Larry Olivier (which is prolly true, given the randy Olivier's penchant for dipping his wick--or getting dipped--with as many male co-stars as would drop their pants with him), the worst thing you can call two of the greatest male film actors of the 20th century is "gay." It seems to be mostly Dickie Burton's family that is screaming he was not gay/bisexual. Take that with a grain of salt. It has been my experience that families are usually the last to know, including wives (no matter how fag-hag they may be, i.e. Liz Taylor--the claim about him appearing in HER biography)!
There is a lawsuit going on right now started by a school kid who wore an earring on what his high school colleagues perceived as the side indicating he was gay so, naturally, that meant they had to hit him on the head more than 300 times when passing in the school hallways. Interestingly, the law suit seems to be less about gay head-bashing than about his hurt feelings that his buddies would consider him such a low-life slime as a cocksucker.
Queer, fag, pervert, homo, remain the worst things our society can call you. These tags can destroy your home life, your school life, your work life, and, sometimes, if your name is Matt Shepard, et al., your real life. Despite the calumnies, we keep popping up in every culture, every society, from time that was, is and will be.
I really doubt that even genetic restructuring will wipe us out--and I have no doubt that there will be straight parents in the future who will opt for that if the "gay gene" is isolated in their unborn child. They would have re-oriented William Shakespeare. What a loss!
Why do I doubt? It is not that I have taken a leap of faith as the religionists do to justify their beliefs, but more my perhaps cynical observation of the human scene for the past 66 years in dozens of countries, cultures and relationships. Sexual orientation strikes me as a composite formed from diverse elements of the human condition, not just from one twist of the DNA pretzel.
To be gay is, I believe, a combination of many factors across the spectrum of physical and mental coloration. There is no figurative "black" or "white" in being gay. How could there be when the totality of lesbians or gay men runs the gamut of super-macho to super-femme, and then you must factor in the transgendered and bisexual? There are not two sexes. There are a dozen, if not more.
Manhood and womanhood cannot be wholly measured by the reproductive equipment found in the crotch. It is meant for more than breeding in a species meant to break its chains to earth and soar in the firmament of ideals.
THE END
