The 'Glee' Approach vs. The 'Weekend' Approach

Recently, I experienced two different artistic experiences of injecting "the gays" onto screens (and yes, gays are still being injected. We're not just there, the way Cinderella stories run rampant in rom-coms or zombies run through theme parks. But we're getting there). For gays, the way this happens can be touchy: a marketing campaign with too many cooks in the kitchen. Do you go hard or soft? Peaceful protest or demanding rights, right now?

Well, that's the fun part right?

My first of two recent experiences I am sure you will be familiar with: Glee. What are your thoughts? Is it over the top "gay in your face" agenda pounding propaganda? Or is it just a modernized version of Saved by the Bell? It's not a staple of my weekly entertainment intake, but when I heard last week's episode was to gush over, complete with boot knocking frenzy, I figured I would take a peek. Glee's director and creative mastermind, Ryan Murphy, has been "bold" on projecting "real" gay characters into his series...yes...Kurt and Blaine have done so much as kiss, rub noses, and canoodle fully clothed on their bed. Groundbreaking, right? As one of my gay coworkers put it, "if that's what America thinks we do, they'll all be in for a big surprise."

But, yes, it is groundbreaking, sort of, and I have to give Murphy some credit. He's a "victim of the times" so to speak. Gays are going through their 1950's right now where shared beds on TV is still a display of hedonism, and where a candid portrayal of a gay person growing up "out" and confident, is an affront to people's world paradigms. So I give him credit, mainly because he's getting the ball rolling. Am I happy that such confidence in gays comes from a show flagrantly devoted to musicals, pop culture, and sex? Maybe not, but I also know that part of changing people's thoughts also requires starting on known territories.

Gays like musicals. Fine.

However, despite the kids gloves handling of the issues, these characters are reaching one of the widest audiences ever. So, that is the first approach, we'll call it The 'Glee' Approach.

Now, my second experience was a little more... brazen. I went to an indie film called "Weekend," and boy was it a treat. The aptly named film takes place over 48 hours from the end of a drunk Friday outing at"Propaganda," a gay night club in Nottingham, UK, through to the end of Sunday. After meeting on the dance floor, two attractive gay men spend the weekend doing everything from sex, to coke, to bumper cars, to amateur art exhibits. But most importantly, they spend the bulk of the film discussing what it means to be gay in a world meant for straight people.

Essentially, the movie is one big meta piece of art.

The more vocal of the two gay men proclaims at one point, "straight people will go to movies about, war, disease, murder, and rape, but if it has gay sex....whoa! they can't go to that. Only the gays will come." And of course, I looked around the theater to see only the prophesied pockets of gay men watching the film. Was it true though? Does gay sex stop straight people from coming in the theater better than a defensive line, or was this just a case of gay people flocking inordinately to see representations of themselves on the big screen? Who knows?

The film's voracious, thought provoking instigator works at the more reserved protagonist as he struggles with his own sexuality. And indeed, in the end, the movie certainly pushed me, an out gay man, to think even further about ideas of self loathing, pride, gay activism, etc. If the Glee Approach had kids gloves on, the Weekend Approach came wielding a sharpened bayonet, at least in terms of pushing gay characters into ultra representative settings. And the actors were spectacular as well.

So then, what do you think is the correct way to continue injecting gay characters into story lines? Should we stay slow, allowing the general public time to acclimate to the warm water before turning up the heat? Or should we push them in, knowing nerves may be singed, but hey, this is life, get over it? I would love to hear your thoughts.

Book Review: Dash and Lily's Book of Dares

David Levithan and Rachel Cohn have done it again: an exciting novel based in Manhattan following a romantically liberal pair of high school students as they woo each other through a series of larger than life stunts. Yes, this is the third installment in the loosely connected series beginning with Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist, continuing with Ely and Naomi's No Kiss List, and, now, Dash and Lily's Book of Dares. The paired authors certainly have a talent for pulling off extremely witty, extremely romantic stories. But, this time around I couldn't help hearing the publishers calling out from each page, "if it's not broken, don't try to fix it!"

Before we get to that, here's the premise. Dash and Lily are two unrelated sixteen year old kids who have been left home alone for the holidays: Dash convinced each of his divorced parents that he was spending Christmas vacation at the others' house while Lily was abandoned by her professorial parents as they flew off to Fiji. With loneliness mounting, Lily decides to plant a notebook in one of her favorite bookstores, the Strand, with a set of off the wall instructions for anyone who should find it to follow. Lo and behold, Dash, our hero, finds the book, and the two strike up an unconventional romance as they lead each other around the city through back and forth entries into the red Moleskin.

In the midst of the two love birds' gallivanting, the story tackles a number of themes including idealism vs. realism, commercialism, what it means to be caring, and even substance abuse to a certain degree, though these topics certainly take a back seat to the story's lighthearted romantic-comedy flare. Like its predecessors, Dash and Lily holds our two wise teenagers up against a host of unique personalities ranging from vulgar to vicious while they try to make sense of their budding adulthood. In the end, the story accomplishes painting a wonderful New York City winter landscape full of twists and turns along the way.

All these great strengths aside, and believe me when I say I loved reading this book, I can't help but think that these characters are starting to become a little bit repetitive. The formula, essentially, consists of having the main characters present a compilation of artistic/literary knowledge and having the love interest meet on the common grounds of the humanities, all the while being insanely well versed for high school students. Hey, I love it and as I said above, if it's not broken, don't fix it.

However, I know that Levithan/Cohn have the ability to develop these characters further without simply finding more and more unique settings and circumstances to place them into. For high school students reading the book, having a string of similar characters probably isn't even an issue. The recurrence of these archetypical adolescent wonder children may also be indicative of the publishers' desire to stay safe on a known winner; who knows, they may also be hoping to land another movie deal, but while I was reading I couldn't help but think I was reading a second version of Nick and Norah, with the characters changing names and hobbies but otherwise being the same. In all reality, I'm just dying to see how the two authors would face a more mature character set, possibly in their early twenties.To be fair, Bruce the Second in Ely and Naomi, really began to break out of the mold, bringing in a crisis of self-identity. In fact, Ely and Naomi overall felt like Levithan/Cohn's style was evolving away from the entertaining but simple love story of Nick and Norah.

This is probably why I even bring it up at all: I thought I might get to see my desires for that no man's land of 18-30 years old on the pages of this new installation (which I fully understand would knock the novel out of the all important YA classification). Instead, what I got was a very entertaining, very endearing love story in the vein of Nick and Norah, but hey, I certainly don't think that's anything to complain about. I highly recommend this book, especially as we enter the winter holidays.

Book Review: Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone

Yes, it is with mixed emotions that I review J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone. Why would I do such a thing, fifteen years after being released, and after millions of people have already read it? Well, for one, I like critiquing and it is the most recent book I read. Two, I think it's important, personally, to see what it is about this book that has so enchanted its readers (pun totally intended).

So, of course the book follows a young boy who thinks he's a muggle but really he's a wizard and his parents are dead and he goes to a big magical school and he's a bit of a prankster and he makes friends and finds out mysteries and wins games on broomsticks. Now that we got that out of the way...

The style of this book is PRO READER in every sense, as if offering up continual bounties with each page. The sentences are simple, light-hearted, and fairy tale-esque. The characters are archtypical, easily categorized. The plot is fun, easy to follow, and provides some sort of surprise each chapter. But most of all, the entire Harry Potter Universe is our own, simply amplified.

I think this is the real key. It's as if J.K. Rowling has taken the sensation we have when, every blue moon, we decide to buy a lottery ticket and bottled it up to sprinkle on the pages. We read the story of a lonely child longing to have a better life, and when he finds it, he discovers that every single childhood fantasy is real. We constantly ask ourselves, whether we know it or not, what if that was real? What if I could fly on broomsticks? This boy came from a "muggle" family, what if I'm a wizard too? In that sense, the story is not so much a "fantasy" as it is an "augmented reality." Obviously, there is a bit of this in every fantasy, but here we don't have to start off accepting a new world or new behaviors or new circumstances. Yes there are trolls and ghosts, but we know what trolls and ghosts and unicorns are. But even more, we know what it feels like to be in the first day of class, yet this book takes that feeling and throws in the ability to become invisible and make fires appear from magic wands. The closeness to reality really makes this book approachable.

Having said that, I really felt there was a lack of character development. Characters didn't really grow on me as they simply kept reaffirming, more and more evidently, the stereotypes which they had been born into. Yes, we all had the genius girl classmate who was smarter than us and that upset us. And yes the characters grew and matured through the book, but that's not real character development. I didn't feel the change I just saw it. And unfortunately the times I did feel I was getting closer to characters, the methods used were plot driven. Hopefully this changes in her later books which, all in all, I'm excited to read.

I feel this book is also a great gateway book to other fantasies. I am dying to read the Lord of the Ring trilogy and compare writing styles (knowing full well they are leagues apart). It will be interesting to see how two very different authors were both able to entertain so many readers.

Book Review: "Will Grayson, Will Grayson"

I'm excited to post my first book review on an excellent young adult fiction, Will Grayson, Will Grayson, a collaboration by David Levithan and John Green; I'm pretty sure that as my first book to review here on Moving Metaphor, I have been very spoiled.

Will Grayson, Will Grayson follows the lives of two boys, each named Will Grayson, as they meander their way into an understanding of mature friendships, relationships, loves and heartbreaks. The story is told uniquely, with the point of view and first person narration shifting between the two Wills chapter by chapter. The first Will Grayson we meet is regimented, straight, from an affluent household and lives under the massive shadow (literally) of his ironically named friend, Tiny Cooper. The second Will Grayson we meet struggles with depression, is gay, lives meagerly with his single mom and is infatuated with his online boyfriend, Isaac. The two Wills' lives remain detached for the first few chapters but then collide suddenly in the middle of a Chicago porn shop. I won't say anymore because, really, the entire book is so entertaining both on an emotional and humorous level that each scene should be left untouched.

Overall, I am extremely happy to know that books like this exist. The world that Levithan and Green create is raw: we learn about the sex lives of most all of the major characters in high school and we are presented gay and straight characters who are not perfect, in any way, who struggle with both stereotypical and atypical issues of their times. It is candid: the voice used by both Wills is dripping with profanities, sarcasm and digital abbreviations and we see high school students being, well, high school students flirting with the law and the consequences thereof. But, the story is also larger than life, like the confocal character, Tiny, who decides to turn his entire life into a fabulous musical. The melange of rawness, candor, and hyperbole make the story rich with flavor and variety and in the end you truly feel you have journeyed with the characters and have learned a little more about love (and even "capital L" Love).

I highly recommend this book, if nothing else, for the laughs. Know going in however, that it is on the "edgier" side of young adult fiction so if you enjoy your pristine image of high schoolers running through forests and lying under the sun (with a solid two feet of distance between reproductive organs) then you might want to avoid this one. Or, you could loosen up a bit and have a lot of fun too.