Preview Review: Straight-Jacket

OPENS FRI., DEC. 10

THEY COULDN'T HAVE picked a worse time to screen the preview to the new gay screwball comedy Straight-Jacket. Had it been slated for release a year ago or a year from now, I'd have told you about the trailer's artistic and cinematic merits, or lack thereof. But not now, not after the victory of America's undead on Nov. 2.

The previewabout a gay actor in the gay, kitschy 50s marrying a secretary to conceal his gaynessis a dangerous provocation. What the movie is saying is that today's gays really love the 50sthe dumbest, shallowest, most bigoted, least interesting decade in American historyand all they ever really wanted was to relive those 50s and be accepted. Not change it, or destroy itbut rather to be Ward Cleaver's gay neighbors whom Ward and June love having over for bitching sessions and My Fair Lady sing-alongs.

I don't mean to come across as homophobic, because I'm really not. In fact, I'm such a gay symp that if it weren't for the sex, I'd have gone gay a long time ago. It's because of my sympathy for gays, who were never jerks to me, that I feel I have the right to call them on this:

You people don't just need a debate; you need a civil war.

Let's just remind ourselves of what's happened over the past 10 years. First, Clinton's liberal revolution got crushed from the start because he made gays in the military, rather than health care, his first priority. Why the fuck would gays want to be in the military in the first place? To get hazed, brainwashed, turned into bigots and then sent away to murder defenseless Muslims? Wow, gee, yeah, that was a fight worth risking universal health care on. After the debacle in the 1994 interim elections, Clinton had little choice but to veer sharply right. But heygood news is, gays can now get hazed by dumb hicks.

Then, just when the world hung in the balance, gays decided that they wanted in on the other most wretched of all institutions: marriage. The gays I remember, growing up near San Francisco in the 70s, had nothing but contempt for such foul, cheerless, Christian customs as marriage. Today's gays, I suppose, just want what Straight-Jacket offers: the chance to be gay in a 50s culture, to be accepted into the hideous, superficial, bigoted mob of credulous jerks that ran the country then as today, because you know, in the 50s, they were just so clean-cut and witty, weren't they?

The inhabitable regions of America are disappearing fast. It's a nation of collaborators, no matter what stance they start from.