Wednesday, October 21, 2009

Let the outlaws come out of the closet, people, please!



It has always amused me how the public demands their outlaws straight, so outlaws like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid had to be played by hunks like Paul Newman and Robert Redford, so straight a detective would have a tough finding anything gay about those two, atleast in the movie! I can guarantee you that nice respectable girls would not have gone near old outlaws like Butch Cassidy, and he would be riding with his gang for days and sleeping with them at night, too in a tent. Minus any women but maybe one of the night once in a while.
Men are as bad as the women to demand their outlaws straight. They can kill as many people as they want, even a lot more than they did in real life, but they can't turn on to each other, that is sissy stuff, no real red blooded outlaw ought to do that!
So Hollywood has obligingly given the public straight outlaws for years in order to make more money, so my version of outlaws in the wild west being gay and bisexual makes people uncomfortable. Not all of them, of course, some were just asexual, or got turned on by killing, or the like. But I always swore that I would tell the truth when I grew up and wrote about outlaws. I knew when I was just a little child that a lot of them tended to be gay.
Why because people think of homosexuality as something very bad, so if anyone had gay feelings in the wild west, he naturally thought he was bad, and that helped him on his way to stealing, lying, cheating, and going from bad to worse, living up to expectation.
Outlawry and homosexuality have always been tied together, with homosexuality being the worst of the two, so that it could not be talked about in connection to the outlaws America is so fond of in the movies.
In Red and Dandy, my play about outlaws, Red is the worst thief imaginable, and his heroes are outlaws like Butch and Jessie James. He did not even admit he was bisexual, his dad and brother would have been horrified. A thief, yes, a liar, a drunk, a cheat, but not gay!
He would have known if he admitted he also liked boys, he would have been run out of the country if possible. It is no wonder people with gay feelings one have such a hard time telling the truth about themselves. If they are handsome and women fall in love with them, they are the last to want to know they are gay. It would completely ruin their fantasy. And these guys do their best to comply with what the girls want and change themselves, but most of the time that just does not work. So the women who get mixed up with them are doomed to feel they have been lied to and cheated on all their lives with this guy, with who they don't quite know. And generally don't want to know.
I have always thought we need to let people tell the truth about themselves and then take it from there. Do the sensible thing. Quit trying to change who can't be changed. Maybe in some other life but not in this one! I always have known I could not compete with that way of life once the men were into it, so if I did not want to be cheated on and lied to, I had better accept reality and move on.
I learned not to let myself get too attached to the charming fellows, but sometimes you fall in love with a wild outlaw in spite of yourself and it turns into a sad country song. Heartbreak! Happens all the time even when you are old.

3 comments:

kanyonland King 2.blogspot.com said...

We all know that killing is more acceptable than sex for the viewing public. Being killers is bad enough! Gay killers? Unacceptable. If we have to look at that then we might have to scrutize the Mountain men that rode together, trapped together, lived together...all the cowboys from years back out on the range...
What about all those men who worked on the railroad gone from home? Only the farmers and their wives are not suspect...or are they? Lots of time out on the land. Business men and their endless trips?? Oh My

Bill Pasdeaux said...

Marlon and Malden as butt-buddies in Jacks? What a hoot... How about Nicholsen and Brando "facing off" in Missouri Breaks? The Outlaws were the good-ish guys and Marlon as the Regulator was one wierd dude serving the self-righteous and murderously hypocritical big ranch owner. I think Marlon's character in that one was even flirtatious to his livestock! How about the dynamic between Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise in Interview with a Vampire?

Bill Pasdeaux said...

PS -Gerry--- From: Review of Russell Crowe's "3:10 to Yuma"---> "Gay villains are nothing new in American movies. Indeed, for decades that was the only sort of gay character that showed up with any regularity in mainstream films. Sure, those characters were not always explicitly stated to be gay – and certainly never allowed to be in a healthy same-sex relationship – but from their limp wrists to their swishy walks to their ogling of the very heterosexual hero after whom they secretly lusted, these characters were definitely intended to be perceived as gay."

Remember Jennifer Jason Leigh in "Single White Female?"


Herrad

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