October 3, 2007

The Slight Gay Way

In case you needed any more evidence for the principal reason musical theater isn't the great white way of American popular culture anymore, here's an LA Times article about an upcoming musical entitled "Most Wanted." It's about "the life of Andrew Cunanan, an alluring, chameleonic party boy from the San Diego gay-bar scene. In 1997, he went on an unexplained, 2 1/2 -month cross-country killing spree, climaxing in his infamy-sealing trophy killing of fashion designer Gianni Versace."

What red-blooded American wouldn't want to see a musical about Andrew Cunanan?

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

13 comments:

Anonymous said...

Versace had to go because he never designed a dress that would look good on a woman with normal thighs but I'm sure the rest were innocent victims.

It would make an interesting double feature, probably already planned somewhere in California, see an afternoon performance of Harvey Milk then head to an evening show of Most Wanted. Hmmm.

Anonymous said...

Hey, Steve, network TV is the new "musical theater". Meaning that it is undergoing the same transition from heterocentric entertainment toward gaycentric entertainment.

There was a 60 Minutes segment a while back that explored the gay~Jewish cultural affinity. The two communities share a sense of victimhood etc. Down the road a few years network TV will have an even smaller audience and it will be totally leftwing, gay, Jewish and single non-religious females.

Watch a pro football game this weekend and notice the in-house network advertising pushing entertainment products that are overtly gay, androgynous, or feminized. The culture clash between the network ad spots and the game is jarring.

As in the theater there is a certain percentage of the female heterosexual demographic that will tolerate the gay push. But even this group drops out eventually to cable channels such as USA or Oxygen that market toward traditional females.

Anonymous said...

Still say you should have reviewed "Hairspray" instead.

Anonymous said...

In the late 1990's Paul Simon produced a Broadway musical called "The Capeman," about a Puerto Rican youth who had stabbed two white men to death in a case of mistaken identity in the 1950's and became a cause celebre when sentenced to death (his sentence was commuted and he ended up serving 20 years). Simon got quite a bit of criticism from people who thought the show was glorifying violence.

It was a total flop, closing after a few months with a big financial loss.

Anonymous said...

Firemen demoted and fined for shining torch on gay sex foursome in the bushes

Four firefighters were reprimanded and heavily fined after disturbing an illegal outdoor gay sex romp - because the men accused them of being homophobic.

The crew was travelling past a notorious common popular with gay men and "doggers" when they shone their torches from the engine into bushes.

It is claimed they interrupted four men involved in a gay sex act.

Avon Fire and Rescue Service say they take allegations of homophobia 'very seriously'

One man later contacted AIDS charity the Terrence Higgins Trust, which advised him to launch a formal complaint.

The firefighters were suspended on full pay during a three-month investigation.

Two were fined up to £1,000, one was demoted in rank and the other given a written warning.

They have all been ordered to attend an equality course and the fines will be donated to the a nominated gay-rights charity.

One being mooted is the Jamaican Forum for Lesbians All-Sexuals and Gays (J-FLAG) although no final decision has been made.

Bristol has a large Jamaican community.

The four-man crew has also been transferred to other stations.

It is claimed the complainant had been pleasuring himself in front a group of three men when they were disturbed.

He is now said to be "happy" at the outcome of the disciplinary action but will not face a police investigation into what he and the other men were doing in the area.

The firefighters were charged with bringing their service into disrepute and with the misuse of fire equipment as their actions were deemed homophobic...

Anonymous said...

An interesting new phenomenon is the emergence of teen/tween girls as a huge new audience for Broadway. It seems to have been started by Wicked-- going to see Wicked on Broadway has become a major mother-daughter bonding activity for upper middle class families in the Northeast. Now, with shows like a musical adaptation of Legally Blonde (!), it seems that Broadway has recognized the audience and is actively creating product to serve it.

Anonymous said...

"An interesting new phenomenon is the emergence of teen/tween girls as a huge new audience for Broadway. It seems to have been started by Wicked-- going to see Wicked on Broadway has become a major mother-daughter bonding activity for upper middle class families in the Northeast. Now, with shows like a musical adaptation of Legally Blonde (!), it seems that Broadway has recognized the audience and is actively creating product to serve it."

Not just in America. I am English and my mother and sister are always going to see musicals at the West End theatres and I know they saw Wicked.

The firemen getting done over is a joke BTW. The fire brigade should have referred the complainant to the police where they could have taken his statement. Soon as the brown hatter is finished incriminating himself it's "you're nicked me old china" and a night in the cells.

Anonymous said...

Yes and No Anon 12:42.

Ovitz talked of a "gay mafia" and lost his job because of it, but it's not surprising that gays dominate Broadway or TV/Movies. There is no "Jewish Conspiracy" or anything like that, it's just one of those things, like the Patel family dominating motels across America, or first Irish, then Jews/Italians, then Blacks, and now Russians dominating boxing. It happens.

You are right however on TV being a Gay Ghetto. What's interesting is that men have essentially abandoned TV. Viewership totals for men even accounting for cable like History Channel or ESPN have plummeted. While female viewership has remained relatively stable. Women like gays, for whatever reason [likely the assurance that gays have no sexual desire for them]. Network viewership is down among all demo slices, but total viewership for women has posted only slight declines. For men it's quite large and growing -- supposedly to Video Games. That "Long Tail" guy has some stuff on his blog, also Jeff Jarvis aka Buzz Machine and the guy from "Big Picture" blog.

What will really hurt Hollywood is that TV requires a certain min for audiences, no matter how desireable the demo.

Yes "High School the Musical," "Wicked," and other musicals make decent money. By charging LOTS for tickets (which IIRC start at $60). It's live entertainment so it's essentially unpirateable. Not so for DVDs, or TV shows. I'm sure any swap meet in California can produce say, the pirated version of "Friday Night Lights" for around $10. You can get movies pirated at swap meets or so I'm told for around $3 or less. There's a price ceiling for movies/DVDs.

[Broadway is also a teen girl thing -- non-threatening sorta-lotta gay guys singing and dancing. Watch YouTube -- any video with a group of boys re-enacts Jackass the Movie, any video with a group of girls re-enacts pop tart videos. I.E. this behavior seems hard-wired.]

The bigger issue, is what happens to Hollywood in general when gays are over-represented? Can gay men write things straight men will watch on movie screens or DVDs? The answer so far is resoundingly no. Freak shows like "Lara" (formerly Larry) Wachowski, who had the sex change operation and has his on-call dominatrix, might appeal to the uber-trendy Hollywood DESPERATE not to appear in any way like the audience ... aka ordinary people, which is the real reason for Gays over-represented there.

But how can a freak like Wachowski write anything that Joe Average will pay money to see?

To sum up: Hollywood is constrained to create mass-market hits since they can't charge niche "Broadway" ticket prices ... movies are too easily pirated. They have too many Gay guys writing, directing, producing, making stuff that's unpalatable to straight men [Advertising too is like this ... it IS weird seeing Desperate Housewives or Dirty Sexy Money or Big Shots promo-ed on ESPN ... the audience is not going to watch those shows].

Dump Hollywood stocks? Given that Hollywood is giving Gay directors (Schumacher's Batman and Robin, Singer's Superman Returns) carte blanche for Summer Blockbusters, maybe.

Anonymous said...

In the 50's, the heyday of the film and perhaps even the stage musical, some of the top choreographers were alpha males. It's hard to image Fred Astair, Gene Kelly and Bob Fosse finding work today in a world where "straight" is at least a mildly derogatory word.

Even before drunken rant on Jewish conspiracies, Mel Gibson was largely vilified by the Hollywood establishment for his very un-PC approach to film:

- Bravehart - depicting gays as effeminate, ineffective leaders and detested by alpha-male warriors (Edward II, the first and only openly gay king of England, should have been so lucky to have taken a swan dive from a castle turret)

- Passion of Christ – depicting some Jews as bad guys and a little too authentically even though authenticity was his whole stichk and everyone was Jewish (who uses subtitles and Aramaic dialog for a major motion picture FGS).

- Apocalypto – depicting historic non-Western urban Mayan brutality even while idealizing its pastoral life and also implying European colonization and Christianity as a relatively positive development in human history.

Gibson is a decent director, but his films get a big popularity boost from uniquely exposing PC taboos. He depicts subjects of interest with more realistic perspectives that typical Hollywood types would never venture yet which are popular with the typical hetero male moviegoer: history, war and archetypical manly heroes within a pro-Western, Christian context.

Like many large-scale, complex, costly joint ventures (finance, software, etc), film projects depend upon extensive personal networks to create critical masses of hard-to-find required talent and resources. Unlike other fields of complex high-level human projects, there are relatively little objective criteria, highly politicized social agendas, and little predictability in success so the film industry more aggressively tends toward an unusually uniform tribal composition of like-minded insiders like Jews, gays, and scions of players with risk-averse and heard-like behaviors.

Anonymous said...

My Fair Laddy.

Anonymous said...

A few years ago some women friends told me how much they loved the show "Will & Grace". They also told me their husbands would never watch it. I wonder why?

Anonymous said...

If anyone has seen the Sunday nite soap opera,"Brothers and Sisters"the thing with Sally Field,made by the guy who did 30 Something,you will notice that one of the characters,the gay lawyer,is often referencing "Wicked",as in "I saw Wicked there.." or another character will say to him,"Do we have to see Wicked again?" an obvious in-joke about gays loving the play. When I first heard the premise of this play,my immediate thought was,"I bet the author is gay." Weird how gay men who do the things they do(:D) and teen girls should have similar obsessions! What does it all mean? Well sir,I find this show more and more nauseating,cloying and unwatchable. :0

Anonymous said...

Anon. said:

Like many large-scale, complex, costly joint ventures (finance, software, etc), film projects depend upon extensive personal networks to create critical masses of hard-to-find required talent and resources. Unlike other fields of complex high-level human projects, there are relatively little objective criteria, highly politicized social agendas, and little predictability in success so the film industry more aggressively tends toward an unusually uniform tribal composition of like-minded insiders like Jews, gays, and scions of players with risk-averse and [herd]-like behaviors.

Perfectly true. This is the most insightful comment in a long time.

Note that in Hollywood your answer to the inevitable question "Are you tribe [i.e. jewish]?" makes or breaks you. Homosexuality is acquiring a similar function. A producer for a large home improvement television network told me the execs have a new and (within the corp) explicit policy of hiring only homosexuals as above the line production people. You can imagine how that affect below the line as well.