DONDE ESTAN LOS TODOS CHICOS AT?

in which a really kick-ass title is justified by slapdash musings at any cost

the boys in the band is an over the top camp fest that's worth the two hours because that's the cultural consensus. there's been a renewed buzz. it was a seminal production in raising the mass media profile of queer identity and succeeds as entertainment for the same reason: the camp fest as performance is staged nearly just as self-consciously today as it was at the end of the sixties. stonewall was no doubt responsible in part for the boys in the band making it from play to screenplay in 1970 (the live theater OF COURSE already a safe house for homosexual conceit), and a spat of dialogue in the film not so subtly argues over the artistic merits of those two mediums. but whether live or on screen, the boys' personalities are irrefutably caricatures, caricatures that decidedly prefer melodrama to allegory. is that in itself a homosexual tendency? or is that how discussions of homosexual identity tend because of works like the boys in the band. an old question, and a moot, uninspired one, really.

something else, then. if most of the current population is just as (or maybe even more) anxious and neurotic as the party of queens and fairies in the boys in the band, shouldn't everyone be having just as much fun? when sexuality became less contentious, did sex get screwed by the stamp of normality? probably not. that second question might be even more banal than the first. all those guys cruising donald in the opening sequence sure were smiling, though. and his friend gave him all those free books from doubleday! plus, credit was much harder to track back then, and apartments in manhattan were cheap! and either all those actors had glute padding or everyone in the summer of '68 looked impossibly good in pants. the grass is always greener behind the bushes in someone else's public park, perhaps. or rather, perhaps the boys in the band has absolutely no resonating cachet and it's no more use worshiping there than at the sacrifice of any other era or people's cultural gestalt.

on with the now, then! there's a buzz around mexico city...