Common Sense	Common Sense Archive

Back in the 70s and early 80s, I ran a fabulous gay porno movie twin-screen in Boston. The screens ran grind; the toilets were busy. We turned our tiny back-office into an "intimacy suite" for our customers. A good time was had by many for years. A lot of the films were terrific too-- I'm thinking of the Joe Gage trilogy-- and some were stinkers, but it didn't matter. The audience was the show.

One day, as I was sitting in the projection booth between changing reels, and busy writing some article or one of my many unpublished novels, my friend Harry Allard, a professor and a successful children's book writer (Miss Nelson Is Missing, etc.), who had been strolling through the dark theaters, came in to visit me and we talked about the magic of a porno theater. "The most wonderful part," he told me, "is that when you're here, no matter for how long, time stops."

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I hadn't thought of it this way. For me, it was just work. But Harry was right about the power of a porno cinema-- the men lurking about, the images on two screens of men having sex with no heavy plot-- after boy gets boy, plot goes on hold. It's all time-free, with the clock we otherwise live by stopped.

Of course, it's true that this has always been the case with the movies, especially when seen in the old movie palaces built in the 1920s and 30s. Each was a cathedral to the magic of the movies. Gay porno palaces only distilled what had always been true about lush movie culture at its height. It was about pagan culture, sex and stop time. Interesting that the line goes back to the antecedents of Western Christendom-- those pagan cultures that created icons. Think of the three major "Western" religions (Christian Science and Mormonism don't count!)-- Judaism, Christianity, and Islam-- and it's only Euro-Christianity that made icons of the human body-- those of the Jewish tradition and Islam were forbidden to create images of the human form. Why? What could be more divine?

And, boy, oh, boy, when we get to the Renaissance in Italy 600 years ago, the human form really does become divine. Even the painted baby Jesus gets sexualized. Since the Renaissance-- until the invention of the movies-- paintings were the peoples' entertainment and instruction. And good entertainment it was. Folks still schlep out to see the Sistine Chapel.

Then AmeriKa got invented. By greedy land-grubbers, religious freaks, and others who washed over. Many centuries later, the country remains the most religious amongst the western democracies. Author Edmund White once noted that, while he resided in France and would meet about with mucky-mucks, he would tell them that 3 out of 4 leading CEOs in the USA were born-again Christians and were personally conversant with The Nazarene. The French officials simply assumed these were amongst the insane, my line.

Thank the Goddess for the Italians and their paganism. It took a while after the Christian cult got established, but that good ol' Italian ancient religion, paganism-- the love of the divine in the human-- triumphed. It helped to have a woman's touch, thus Marianism. And all those saints-- pure pagan iconography.

Back to Hollywood. Those joes and doxies were in the business of selling only one thing-- sex. They did it all so well that various so-called Legions of Decency, mostly of the wrong-kind-of Catholic variety, called for a clamp-down. Thus Hays and Breen and that ilk. Hollywood still sold sex. The movies are iconography a go-go! The stars are gods and goddesses. I was lucky enough to grow up in a time wherein many old movie palaces still existed-- the outposts of industrial paganism in many small cities like mine.

Here's the wonderful part, the song of AmeriKa. We got the movies. The studios were run by Jewish immigrants, many of them real shits. Their product was pure paganism-- gods, goddesses, lustful adventures-- and sold to the good Christian ladies and gentleman out there in the land in the pagan temples. The Jewish cult, warned against icons, had some of the brothers churn out the largest volume of images celebrating the pagan lifestyle in all history. Who financed that incredible scene wherein Liz Taylor, as Cleopatra, gets schlepped into Rome on that conveyance?

Movie theaters as places of celebration of pagan culture. Movie theaters as places for easy sex. Film culture as redemption of the faggot sensibility. Who could ask for anything more? Let's let our friend Frank O'Hara make the point very clear in his poem "Ave Maria."

It begins: "Mothers of America, let your kids go to the movies," and notice he doesn't recommend that mothers should take their kids to the movies. Frank goes on: "they may even be grateful to you, for their first sexual experience, which only cost you a quarter, and didn't upset the peaceful home." Then: "if nobody does pick them up in the movies, they won't know the difference, and if somebody does it'll be sheer gravy so don't blame me if you won't take this advice, and the family breaks up, and your children grow old and blind in front of a TV set, seeing movies you wouldn't let them see when they were young."

Think Tennessee Williams' Hard Candy. Yum-yum. Stop Time.

Author Profile:  Mitzel
	Mitzel was a founding member of the Fag Rag collective, and has been a Guide columnist since 1986. He manages Calamus Books near Boston's South Station.
	Email:	mitzel@calamusbooks.com
	Website:	calamusbooks.com