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Monday 23 July 2007

Gay Men == Animals. In 2 Hours. [Brit]

Sunday night telly is usually shit. Inevitably, you realise you"re watching a re-run of Turner and Hooch on ITV2 or something involving white middle class fat people espousing their tiny brains on Issues Of The Day.
Last night promised to offer something slightly different; "Clapham Junction" was billed as a gay drama set in Clapham (and by this as we saw, they meant "anywhere within 4,000 miles of Clapham, depending on how the Director was feeling") and apparently lifting the lid on modern gayness and attitudes to same.
It took about 15 minutes before I realised this was anything but - its very difficult to describe what exactly was going through the author/director/production team"s mind but I can only assume it was large quantities of meta-amphetamines.
Lets break down the characters, and the message associated with each:
  • Gays play string instruments to hide their sexual orientation! - Skinny violin playing black kid. Looked about 14, and contributed nothing to the entire ensemble other than the vague notion that he was being intimidated by other kids because of his penchant for cat gut and Nigel Kennedy CDs. Appeared twice in the whole two hour production with zero integration with any other character or indeed any individual character development.
  • Gay men are filthy animals with no morals! - Gay couple get married in a civil ceremony in what appeared to be Somerset House. Minutes after exchanging vows, Groom #1 is hitting on a member of the waiting staff. Minutes later, they"re in the pantry snorting drinking champers, snorting coke off pedestal bases whilst Groom #1 goes for the whole "Hows Your Father?". Waiting staff breaks it off and leaves, Groom #1 goes back to Groom #2 who immediately asks for the coke.
  • Gay teenagers suck pens when they can"t suck cock! - Skinny dead-eyed white kid, no older than 15, starts eyeing up some heroin-chic bloke in the school library; a bloke who is clearly double his age. Suggestive biro sucking and glances end in frustration as the older guy leaves.
  • Gay men are mentally unbalanced and ultra violent! - Paul Nichols (don"t ask) meets a skinhead in a club, there is a passing reference to piss and they retire to the latter"s appallingly decorated apartment which looks like seconds from last season"s IKEA bargain basement. Paul Nichols (don"t ask) makes up a lie about his mum and proceeds to batter the shit out of the skinhead and whilst our balding homo lies on the floor all bloodied up, Paul Nichols (don"t ask) takes an enormous piss on him; before saying "I hate the fucking Pet Shop Boys" and leaving.
  • Getting fucked in a toilet is normal, especially for closest homos! - Harley Street Doctor phones wife and says he is going to be late to a dinner engagement. Working late he says, before sidling off to a toilet in Clapham Common and engaging in a spot of glory hole blow-jobbing followed by a violent lubricant free cubicle fuck. He"s clearly working out his issues, and just as things come to a climax the waiter from the wedding comes in.
  • Gay men can"t run! And then get beated up and killed! - Waiter is accosted in the toilets after having a wry smile to himself (he sees the closet homo above in the cubicle as his beau leaves, post coitus. Waiter runs out of the toilets and then bizarrely starts running across Clapham Common. Anyone who knows the area knows that the exit from the toilets isn"t onto the Common, it is straight into Clapham Common shopping area/main road/traffic lights. So he gets teleported, chased down and beaten up.
  • Gay teenagers so driven for sex they seduce paedos! - Biro sucking dead-eyed teenager happens to live right opposite his library co-reader, who also happens to be a paedo and lives in a burnt out flat (what the fuck ??). Teenager pops over, gets into burnt out flat and after a few fags and some Carling Black Label, is busy climbing aboard the paedo-express for a return journey to Sausage City.
  • Gay men are evil and let other gay men die. But not before they"ve robbed them! - Paul Nichols (don"t ask) attempts to seduce yet another fat bald man on a park bench, fails, and stumbles across the waiter who is behind a bush and all bloodied up. Paul Nichols (don"t ask) nicks his ring and then shifts - waiter boy dies in hospital later, following some ridiculous white middle class tete-a-tete during a dinner party.

  • Thats it, in a nutshell. It was pathetic. Indescribably shameful in its approach, delivery and execution. Fundamentally awful at all levels, and so full of utter fantastical bullshit it should have had "Harry Potter And The: " prefixed to the title. The author, the Commissioning Editor of Channel 4, and indeed anyone involved in bringing this heap of crap to life should be taken to Clapham Junction and pushed in front of the nearest GNER service.

10 comments:

  1. Brit, isn"t it true that all of the above plotlines happen in regular dramas? In those cases, nobody says "straight men only fuck in toilets". Seems to me like you"re taking a standard minority kneejerk reading more into something and managing to take offence with your daft leap of logic.
    It"s just a drama, not a documentary. Get over it?

    ReplyDelete
  2. You didn"t like it then.
    More seriously, you have to wonder at who the target audience for a drama like this is. If it"s gay men, well, it"s going to gain the kind of response such as this isn"t it. If it contains any seedy gritty type drama issues, it"s going to be lambasted as painting the gay community in a bad light or something.
    And while I"m open minded enough, would I watch a drama about gay men? Err no I wouldn"t. I"d watch a drama that had gay men in it certainly, but if the drama is about gay men I"d clearly not identify with it and not watch it.
    So you have to wonder what the producers" expected.

    ReplyDelete
  3. I recon it"d get a worse response if all the characters loved kylie, wore pink shirts and shouted "I"m Free" all the time. Sounds to me they"ve made it like a regular drama featuring gay men, and still they can"t win.

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  4. Actually, my problem with it wasn"t the fact that these things were pushed front and center, but the fact that there was absolutely nothing else at all.
    Whilst certain characters were linked - predominantly through the use of a dinner party at which only two of the gay characters attended (the others were linked in via events that occurred in the Common onto which the dinner party location fronted) it was simply a series of short and fairly offensive stories revolving around the items I"ve listed above.
    "Gritty type drama issues" we see on any and all dramas regardless of whether they"re a series or a one off like Clapham Junction - but where this became ridiculous, even somewhat offensive was the core message that if you"re gay, you"re pretty much a meat seeking missile 24/7 and nothing else matters in life.
    We"ve been slowly eroding mainstream prejudice for decades and attained some measure of equality with the creation of civil partnerships - only to have that particular achievement ripped to bits within the first 20 minutes of this programme when one half of the couple starts sniffing around a waiter"s crotch minutes into the reception!
    No gay man in the entire two hour programme was portrayed as anything but a sex mad moral free risk taking animal cavorting beneath a wafer thin veneer of respectability.
    I expected a lot more.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Bizarre, target audience has to be incredibly small. straight men wont watch it, gay men with any political interest will hate it. Left are some faghags and jay. Now take Lword. Lesbians. Every girl will watch it and straight men will wank off to it. Genious.
    And i must comment on the prejudice shit. Im a white straight man living in a western country, if i can handle the shit dished out about my type of person, well then homos sure as fuck can handle some toiletsex stories :)

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  6. I hate to say it but he has some kind of point. It"s like having a sexual orientation creates a whole subset of society which cannot be shown in any unflattering light for fear that it might be homophobic. Same sort of thing as muslims.
    Still, if it"s shit drama and he didn"t like it because that"s the total angle attached to gay men then yeah, he"s right to not like it.
    And, you know, the more I think about it. Most coverage of gay men has been completely devoid of cock-seeking queers of dubious morals. Where as, I have to say, that does appear to be a significant part of gay society. Isn"t it about time the issue wasn"t pussy footed around any more?

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  7. What was your opinion on that show "queer as folk" then chris? That was shown all over the world, so I assume it was good?

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  8. Since noone has the guts (im very disapointed) i aparently has to do this. Whining about stereotypes and then typing the sentence below is just not ok. At all :)
    "Paul Nichols (don"t ask) meets a skinhead in a club, there is a passing reference to piss and they retire to the latter"s appallingly decorated apartment which looks like seconds from last season"s IKEA bargain basement."

    ReplyDelete

  9. I just watched the History Boys with the missus.  Riddled with gays, absolutely rampant.  Only a bike crashed saved a teacher from a life of abusing children.

    How was this movie viewed by teh gays?

    I liked the movie, but how they were protrayed....michty me.

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  10. alfa that's humour, and everyone's completely missing the point - or aren't really that bothered BY the point as it's not a programme that solely made for the purpose of 'representing' their 'kind' in London for a whole tv season dedicated to representing their 'special little kind'. And all it did was mis-educate and mis-construe and mis-the point!I guess it's not up to people who aren't being 'represented' to judge its level of offense to said group. Who am I to say how offensive the word 'negro' is for example....So, take my word for it, and brits, as someone who's intelligence and sensitivity on the matter you should really understand that this programme was shocking! And the writer should be ashamed!

    ReplyDelete