Posted by Smalls at syr-24-24-14-133.twcny.rr.com on August 01, 2001 at 22:09:27:
In Reply to: GLAAD Supporter – Be gentle with me… posted by adamblast on August 01, 2001 at 21:37:05:
: My worries boil down to this: will a closeted teenage queer, watching this movie, be better or worse off afterward? If your snappy dialog gets parroted through the hallways, will the kid be encouraged or made more frightened?
Must every piece of art or culture be constructed, deconstructed, reconstructed, battered, tattered and filtered to the point that they could never be negatively construed by anyone? We'd end up with an entire world of Must See TV, bland, ineffectual, intellectually offensive.
Must we live in a society that bases its judgements on the literal values of the arts, hucking out every subtext and subtle message, just because the message could be interpretted as its opposite by the incredibly ignorant?
The angels and the devils are a package deal, friend.
The complex correct, the simple correct, the simple correct and the complex wrong all gotta be... to have any culture, any language at all.
The totality of human expression cannot, should not, be destroyed and silenced to protect one kid from his idiot classmates misinterpreting a subtle point. I assure you, anyone who'll scream FAG at the poor kid will not do it because of a movie... but most likely because their parents instilled it in them to do so... or the simple tragic reflex of man to hate what's different... not by their misinterpretation of some movie's mockery of homophobia.
And, also, any organization that blackmails filmmakers and their distributors for donations PROBABLY doesn't care so much about what's right and who's hurt... but rather whether they get their donations or not.
The massive corporate structure of any large fund-raising organization usually ends up producing evil... no matter how noble it's basic tenets are. Look what happened with that Jesus guy and HIS followers.
Mike