Why gay romances are the worst
Dear H,
I’ll be upfront with you on this essay: I don’t like seeing gay romances on TV. The better the actors look the less horrible it is; but overall it stinks, and the average man with all his body hair and flabbiness topped off with a stupid football jersey (or worse: dressed like a twink) is so pitiable and sexless that to imagine being in a sexual relationship with him or a marriage or even just waking up next to him and getting a smooch is enough to think women are insane. And maybe they are. Or maybe they’re just desperate. Or maybe they’re manlier than we are for putting up with it. Either way they deserve a hats-off. We go off to war and they make babies with Danny Tanner and I honestly don’t know which is worse.
Some people say not liking gay romance is homophobic, but it isn't. Not only because disgust and fear are two different feelings, but because I feel almost the same way about straight romance. And so does almost everybody else. That’s why heroes fight for Lena Headey and nobody beats a dragon for Lena Dunham. It’s why Arnold Schwarzeneggar gets the princess and Harvey Weinstein is fighting rape charges. If you want your romance to work, the principle to be drawn here is clear. People have to be okay imagining themselves as either the hero or the princess.
I would argue that this is exactly what gay romances fail. First there's the fact that the overwhelming majority of men want women, and the overwhelming majority of women want men. So getting rid of either the woman or the man in a romance means most of us can’t dream about getting anybody because we don’t want what’s left. Not that we think they're ugly or lack charm, but we couldn’t go home after work or school and keep thinking about them, and wonder if they’re thinking about us, and wonder what they look like naked. (You know. The thing romance is based on).
But this is just talking attraction. Beyond this there’s the sodomy issue, and what it involves, and the smells and sights we’re been custom designed (by God) to avoid like the plague — because if we don’t avoid them we end up with one. Shit itself is probably at the top of the "most disgusting" list, alongside maggots and carrion; and I believe men can get over it, especially if they work in sewage, but it doesn't mean they like it or want it on their bedsheets. Mother Nature put up a moat with a KEEP AWAY sign. If you cross that line, even with women, you put yourself outside the normal boundaries of basic health and human feeling.
Once you consider these two hurdles, attraction and repulsion, putting gay romances in big movies is a disaster. The whole point of a movie is putting yourself in somebody else’s shoes. If the shoes are crocs you’ve turned the movie into a tragedy or a comedy, but it can’t be a good romance. That's why there’s a gay section of movies on Netflix. Gay people can't (or don’t want to) imagine themselves in our shoes. So why should the overwhelming majority imagine ourselves in theirs?
The plain fact here is that as Hollywood becomes more leftist they're becoming less democratic. They care less about what most of us feel (or even want to feel) and they're becoming obsessed with what minorities feel — an act which puts them outside communion with the great artists, from Shakespeare to Steinbeck. A great artist reaches into his soul and pulls out a real feeling for most of us. He makes us live what we were born to feel, and when he makes us laugh or lust or cry we thank him for it, and we hand his works on to our grandkids.
But a leftist tries to make you feel what the fringes feel. He doesn't care whether you like it. He doesn't care whether you can feel it. He caters to whoever he's supposed to cater to at that moment, for his own advancement, and if you don't like it he calls you a monster. But in reality he’s Dr. Frankenstein. He’s stitching feelings together in the worst way, and trying to make you feel them towards the wrong people, and if you can't feel them he says you're a jackass. Where’s your sense of empathy?
To this I would just reply, where’s his empathy for us?
Yours,
-J
P.S. The loudest (and worst argued) objections to this essay will come from liberal women. Who are YOU to get in the way of LOVE? I’ll tell you who I am.
I am your inner voice. I was made in the image of God, and the truth flows through me and I listen to it, and I tell you what it says. The voice that tells me when I want to get close to something and when I ought to back away from it. The voice they've all been lying about for decades now, and will continue to lie about so long as they can profit from lying about it.
What liberal women don’t understand is that you can be kind to someone without lying to them. You don’t have to say girl, you’re beautiful! to the ugliest girl in the city. You don’t have to say that all bodies are beautiful or that a man looks good dressed as a woman. You don’t have to say gay romances are just as appealing as straight romances. But they do say it — and by lying, casually and publicly, they cheapen both themselves and the objects of their affection. It makes us think no, that’s ugly — and when we can’t stand the lies anymore, their fake professions of beauty are followed by real professions of ugliness. And guess which ones stick more?
This essay was “inspired” by episode three of The Last of Us, a great zombie apocalypse drama where one man builds a bunker and lives alone for years until he finds love with another man. I thought the episode (a stand-alone, almost) was well-made and the romance was a train-wreck.
I could be accused of callousness here, but I felt as much as most of you felt, and no more. Such as how excited Nick Offerman was when he was left behind by the government and got to put his prepper plans in action. And the joy of building a compound and watching it function well. And the fear of a newcomer crashing in and ruining everything. And the pity he had on the straggler and the kindness he showed him in spite of the danger. And the feeling of being seen for the first time as he really was and accepted. And feeling of being loved for the first time and really needed. And having someone to live for finally and then losing them to cancer. And losing himself with them, and killing himself because he felt he’d served his purpose.
All of these feelings hit me strongly, and were beautifully written and acted and shot. But the gay part of it flopped and tainted the whole thing. Had Offerman’s straggler been a woman and well-casted I could have imagined myself winning her over. When he was laying in bed with her for the first time I could have felt excited and jealous. When she planted the strawberry garden in secret and showed it to him later and they kissed and rolled onto the dirt I could have imagined loving her too.
But instead I got a strong feeling of hell no. I couldn’t feel any attraction. The love-making scenes were awkward, like seeing Bud Cort make out with an 80-year-old lady in Harold and Maude. I felt everything I could have felt, and part of those feelings, instead of being happy, were revulsion. And that was the director’s choice. He knew most of us would feel that way and he put it there anyway. So fuck him** and everybody who does this to our movies.
Climate change activists throw soup cans on paintings to prove a point and we all hate them. But that’s just a murder — we at least saw the thing in full glory and these assassins came in and ruined it. The director here killed an art piece but he committed an abortion. Nobody ever got to see what could have been*, and the reward for it will be a ticket to the Oscars.
*Does a critic have a right to judge an artist?
Sometimes I ask myself this question when somebody’s out making something and I’m sitting on my ass shaming it. But there’s a great difference between technical and moral failures, and I figure if somebody wants to take me somewhere I can complain if they crash, or we end up at the dump. And if the ride stinks, or if the chairs are wet with piss or worse, can’t I speak up? Especially if I’m paying?
(I admit there are perennial haters, and that no matter how small and incompetent you are, a sharp barb at a top artist or a ruling figure always makes you feel significant. You can look down on the man standing on top of you. And this is probably the motivation behind most critical sallies).
**UPDATE (2/27/23): It’s been brought to my attention (by me) that so fuck him might be an unChristian way to put it, but I thought of the alternatives, and quite frankly they just don’t flow. David’s strike my enemies on the jaw and break the arm of the wicked were considered here, alongside Paul's let everyone who doesn't love Christ be accursed, which was announced in the same chapter as do everything in love. In the end the spirit of my phrasing was acceptable but the word wasn't. So I left it.
Yes to everything.
I would add that these force-fed perversions (twists and inversions of natural impulses) are producing a boomerang effect inside of countless souls -- not only in those who instinctively reject them, but also in those who try them out and become disillusioned.
The fact that we aren't allowed to publicly call them perversions, or point out the harms, is the fence around this camp, which is supposedly there to 'protect' the gays from outside attacks -- but the barbed wire is pointed inward to 'protect' them from escaping.
Case in point: outlawing therapy designed to shed the gay lifestyle, even if the client wants that.
This hypocritical suppression will backfire, once the pressure of that hidden revulsion and disillusionment reaches a critical mass. Human nature is designed that way.
The fact that we aren't allowed to publicly give feedback is also the Achilles heel of the agenda -- the change agents are deluded into thinking they have engineered a moral revolution because there's no pushback. They have clues in the tanking profits of entertainment producers who have invested in this genre, but they are lying to themselves about the reason. Watching Disney in this dilemma is entertainment in itself!
So you see, God has the last laugh.