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Shanda Fur Die Breeders

Ever heard the Yiddish phrase shanda fur die goyim? A shanda fur die goyim is a Jew who has done something embarrassing to the community where Gentiles can see. To call someone that is to chastise them for airing their dirty laundry in public. This NYT review of a gay film festival at Lincoln Center […]

Ever heard the Yiddish phrase shanda fur die goyim? A shanda fur die goyim is a Jew who has done something embarrassing to the community where Gentiles can see. To call someone that is to chastise them for airing their dirty laundry in public.

This NYT review of a gay film festival at Lincoln Center brought the term to mind. Here’s why. Excerpt:

The face of gay liberation in 2013 is a sanitized image of polite, smiling gay and lesbian couples parading hand in hand and exchanging chaste kisses at city halls in states where gay marriage has been legalized.

But if there’s a theme to the 25th annual NewFest, the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender film festival that opens on Friday at the Walter Reade Theater, it is that gay liberation is fundamentally about sex. The Supreme Court decision may further validate the rights of gays and lesbians, but their practices in the bedroom are still repugnant to a lot of people. Recent attacks in New York City indicate that a change in the law doesn’t automatically erase prejudice.

OK, wait a minute. We are told that gay liberation is not about sex, and anyone who says it is must be some kind of bigot who is trying to diminish the breadth and depth of gay lives. Except when gays want to present it as fundamentally about sex, well, okay, that’s fine, and if you disagree, you are a bigot. Who can keep up with the double-mindedness of all this? More from the review:

The concept of sexual transgression runs through the festival. The protagonist of Stacie Passon’s “Concussion,” the opening-night film, is a woman whose longtime relationship with her female partner has lost its spark. After a head injury, she embarks on a secret life as an escort, offering her services to women for $800 a session. The movie received a mixed response at the Sundance Film Festival this year.

Within gay and lesbian culture, a more contemporary, pragmatic attitude is expressed in Christina Voros’s documentary “Kink,” a coolheaded, cheerful examination of the pornography industry from the viewpoint of kink.com, a San Francisco studio specializing in films about bondage, discipline and S&M. The movie teems with images of men and women filmed while being bound and flogged, and there are quasi-medical discussions of the physiology of S&M and pleasure.

The one outright dud among the explicit films that fancy themselves transgressive is Yann Gonzalez’s “You and the Night,” a ludicrously arty French trifle in which a transvestite maid arranges a solemn pansexual orgy, though not much really happens. At Cannes last spring, it reportedly emptied the theater.

Lovely.

Look, if you are going to choose morally demented movies like this as emblematic of gay and lesbian culture, you have no right to complain when people judge you on the basis of what you embrace. You can’t have it both ways. You can’t cheer for minstrel shows and complain that people reduce you to minstrelsy.

Here’s an idea: how about making films with gay and lesbian characters who are normal people, not sexual freaks who flog each other, arrange pansexual orgies, work as prostitutes for the fun of it, and suchlike? Based on the description of this film festival in the Times, much of the programming sounds like a fundamentalist preacher’s idea of gay and lesbian life. But it’s not a fundamentalist preacher telling these stories; it’s gay and lesbian filmmakers, and the Film Society Of Lincoln Center.

This reminds of the illogical way pro-choicers talk about unborn children. If women want them, then they’re “babies” to be celebrated … but if they don’t want them, then they’re embryos or fetuses who are nothing more than pieces of tissue. The desire of the pregnant woman determines the moral status of the being inside her; similarly, the political interests of the gay-rights movement determines how you should view extreme sexual transgression (even a young gay journalist who was disgusted by an annual gay bacchanal in NYC — story here; proceed with caution — couldn’t bring himself to pass judgment on it). Basically, the most practical way to think about these issues is to ask yourself, “Which point of view most advances the Sexual Revolution?”, and go from there.

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