Pursed Lips

As I said in June, Spike Lee’s She Hate Me was likely to create controversy in the queer community — best seen in Rachel Krammer Bussel’s NY Blade article and a gay.com review — but I’m surprised it hasn’t been more widespread. Maybe’s it yet to snowball. Or perhaps it’s because Lee’s been doing a lot of interviews, ranging from major gay press to alt-press and even to websites. And I have to admit that reading them fleshed out the movie for me quite a bit. It hadn’t crossed my mind that the farcical scene in which lesbian women inspect protagonist Armstrong was as much a statement about slave history as it was about sexual exploitation.

But that very example shows one of the problems with the movie: It’s all over the place and you have to be mightily erudite to get its many references and understand where it’s nuanced and where it isn’t. I found it awfully difficult to know where the moral message was put forth for the entire audience and where it was meant to portray Lee’s characters’ individual stances. It was easy to see that Lee doesn’t think much of the Bush administration and corporate greed, but it was harder to see that Armstrong’s injection of men on the down low during his confrontation with his former fiance as the character’s perception and not Lee’s. That, to me, was the biggest problem in the movie and, as a someone who lives close to Massachusetts and who sees black churches flocking to join the conservative protest over the extension of civil marital rights in my own regional backyard, I worry that, taken at face value, it simply endorses their religious homophobia.

I posed that very question to Lee when I had the chance and I’m pleased to see the response I got showing up in his interviews: That the down low is a story all its own. I want to see that story told; I want to see African-American homophobia challenged and explored. And perhaps, just as it took Al Sharpton the outsider to tell the Bush administration exactly why the black vote is sacred, it might take Spike Lee to tell us all about homophobic barriers in his community. To me, it’s not just a matter of growing het infections because of hidden biseuxality, but it’s also because we queer folk see African-American men (especially) and women (to a lesser extent) completely abandon their community of origin for ours because they can’t survive within its culture of homophobia. You can see it on Rickie Lake any time the topic’s queerness. The queer women of color still have their “that just ain’t right” sisters along side them while the queer male youths are surrounded by every color but black. You can see the already-complete ostracizing of gay men right on her stage.

Speaking of nuances, even The Village Voice didn’t get them all. Its reviewer saw the Jack Armstrong reference to the all-American man, but failed to note Jack’s really a John Henry. You know, of steel-driving/early grave fame. Personally, I thought the reference to worker exploitation — and black worker exploitation at that — amalgamated with all-Americanism quite taking. The imagery helped frame the whole question of exploitation quite nicely. That the nature of exploitation remains essentially unchanged from John Henry’s day isn’t nuanced in the film and, I think, a lesson we can home with us.

Where the sex farce was obvious, it worked for me. I’ll admit I have a soft spot for sex romp films regardless of whether they veer off into farce. I’ve seen enough jumpy sperm portrayals (remember that sketch from The State about a decade ago?) that I simply see it as a continuation of the farcical material that’s come before. (Pun optional.)

But the lesbian sex? Ah yes, the lesbian sex. Lee did care enough to about lesbian portrayal to bring Tristan Taormino in and I was pleasantly surprised to see a range of dykes types on the screen, ranging from ultra-femme to soft butch. And Lee did an adequate (though not stellar) job of showing that having sex was a complicated, last resort for some of them. Not all the women went to bed, ready and willing and, in real life, lesbians have “partied” to get pregnant. (Though I should mention that “party” means sleeping with a guy, not tUpperWaring their way to pregnancy.) But more than once, I got the “het male fantasy” squick and it came not just during some of the bedding of the lesbians parade but even when Fatima and her gf, Alex, sealed their personal resolutions with a heavy make-out scene. It didn’t strike me as lesbians in love, but as a portrayal for men in love with lesbians.

Big spoiler…

My squickishness reached its apex when Fatima, Alex, and Jack resolve their differences in a three-way kiss. That the kiss between Jack and Fatima revealed a fair amount of love and just a tinge of lust didn’t squick me; it remarked on the history between the two. The all-love-and-lust kiss between Fatima and Alex struck me as genuine, too. But when the dramatic pause between Jack and Alex ended in a kiss of passion, that squicked me. A platonic kiss, one that showed a setting aside of differences and an acknowledgment of something new and tentative, would’ve worked. As it was, the three-way kissing pushed me right into male fantasy exploitation zone.

But then again, it made me stop and think. Did Lee portray this scene as he did precisely to get the male audience tweaked, quite possibly with the message that “See? You’re exploitive, too! You’re just like all the other exploiters in this film!” If so, it was another lost nuance, done at the expense of women like me.

As debatable as the preg-party scenes might be within the lesbian community, I found more interesting the divergent perspectives that are likely to emerge between the African-American and queer communities over Jack Armstrong fathering 1 1/2 dozen kids. At the preview, we questioned Lee about Armstrong’s sense of sin over fathering so many kids, to which Lee said, “It is a sin.” To which we queers said back, “No it’s not.” But here, context is everything. Our audience looked at the situation from, well, a situational perspective. To us, it was contract-driven and everybody knew their place. We predicated it on our own childbearing options and their ramifications. But Lee’s take on the situation sprung from within the African-American community, where the indiscriminate fathering of children is a source of many social problems. I can understand that if a belief is embrace deeply enough to become embedded in your world view, it will figure into how you view an outcome. Thus, Jack.

But, essentially, as Charles Taylor says in his Salon review, “as if a man providing sexual services to adult, financially independent women who have paid for it is the same thing as a man indiscriminately impregnating any woman he can get into bed.” Yeah, what he said.

Last substantial comment: I did enjoy how hopeful an ending the movie made about family. Just as Jack’s parents stay together and redefine their lives around the weary limitations of his father’s debilitating diabetes, Jack redefines his by embracing his fatherhood to Fatima’s and Alex’s children. And the women redefine their parental expectations and couplehood by including Jack in their lives. You get a sense that a noble and perhaps even grand experiment is underway. Despite witnessing the very real stress Jack’s parents endure, you get a strong sense that life is a cycle where new definitions are formed out of unexpected circumstances and that, through many things, “family” can endure.

At the screening, Tristan Taormino mentioned her belief in “bisexual resolutions” and one certainly captures of a sense of that notion in She Hate Me‘s ending. Granted, as a bisexual women who’s kept her own family together despite differing identity and erotic needs, I’m prone to embracing the ending, but I also think family, wherever possible, should be an expansive definition. As our population diversifies and ages, the very notion of nuclear family is going to have to change, not just along sexually political or identity lines, but along age, ethnicity, generation, and any number of other factors. The last thing we should be doing is living alone in couplehood. It’s too isolating.

Yes, Lee’s film throws you into its central dilemma headfirst, wanders all over the place, and preaches. Most of us will find it either a scattered experience or as messy and celebratory as life really is. Who among us will hate She Hate Me? Let me put it this way: It won’t be a waste of your time or money unless you fall squarely into the Fox News viewing demographic.