Durban - “One of the things that’s very much part of my public image is the question of my sexuality. It’s not something that bothers me in the slightest. It hasn’t gone away and I get asked about it from all sides.”
These are the words of Hollywood actor James Franco, who earlier this year told Attitude Magazine it was partly his own fault that people believe he is gay.
The 33-year-old has portrayed gay characters in three movies, including Milk, in which he starred opposite Sean Penn. Penn played San Francisco politician Harvey Milk, the first openly gay politician, and Franco played one of his lovers.
In The Broken Tower, Franco volunteered to simulate oral sex on a co-star for one of the scenes. The actor directed and starred in the film as part of his thesis for his Master of Fine Arts in film-making at New York University. It tells the story of poet Hart Crane, and Franco plays one of the late Crane’s lovers. The poet, who died in 1932, was neither closeted nor openly gay.
There’s no telling how Crane would have lived his life had he been alive today, but there is little doubt that homosexuality is no longer taboo, especially in the western world, where a rights revolution is unfolding.
In the US, the fight against the Defence of Marriage Act, signed into law by then-president Bill Clinton to protect the traditional definition of marriage as being between a man and a woman, has gone all the way to the Supreme Court.
Separate states are fighting their own battles to make gay marriage legal, with victories being registered along the way.
Several top US politicians, including Clinton himself, have one after the other followed in President Barack Obama’s footsteps in pledging their support for gay marriage. More Americans than ever support gay rights. But what could have changed their minds?
The younger generation are less conservative than their parents, but television could be another factor.
Last year, US television featured a total of 111 gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgendered characters, according to the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD). The alliance releases annual reports on ethnic and gender diversity in the media. Shows like Glee, The New Normal, Downton Abbey and Modern Family were responsible for racking up the numbers.
The New Normal centres on a gay couple who are awaiting the birth of their first child, aided by a surrogate mother, of course.
In Modern Family a gay couple are raising an adopted daughter. Funnily enough, as much as former presidential candidate Mitt Romney was politically opposed to gay marriage, it has been reported that Modern Family is among his favourite TV shows.
The increase in the number of gay characters in mainstream television reflects “a cultural change in the way gay and lesbian people are seen in our society”, according to GLAAD.
In the South African context, gauging society’s feelings about homosexuality is a bit tricky. A recent gay wedding in KwaZulu-Natal not only drew headlines but was condemned by other members of the community of KwaDukuza, where the couple wed.
Worse still, there is no shortage of stories about corrective rape.
In 2011, Human Rights Watch said that South Africa’s constitution allows for freedom of sexual orientation, yet our people don’t. The organisation released a 93-page report that documented research conducted through 120 interviews with lesbian women and transgender men. The report found that both groups face extensive discrimination and violence in their daily lives.
Just last year, six years after gay marriage was legalised, the Congress of Traditional Leaders of SA called for the clause in the constitution that protects gay rights to be removed.
The clause reads: “The state may not unfairly discriminate directly or indirectly against anyone on one or more grounds, including race, gender, sex, pregnancy, marital status, ethnic or social origin, colour, sexual orientation, age, disability, religion, conscience, belief, culture, language and birth.”
Traditional leaders now insist that most South Africans are opposed to homosexuality and this clause, therefore, needs to be changed.
This kind of attitude is reflected in our reactions to witnessing gay love on television. In the late 1990s the SABC broadcast a comedy series titled Streaks. The protagonist was a gay hairdresser with bleached blond hair and a queerness that put the word flamboyant to shame. Some will also remember Maxime, the gay party planner who was on Generations. Maxime was the go-to guy for Queen, played by Sophie Ndaba.
It was only a couple of years later that South African television began to portray gay characters in a less stereotypical manner. You might remember the likes of Steve Stethakis, who was played by Emmanuel Castis, in SABC3’s Isidingo.
Perhaps the one moment that stands out in the South African psyche is the controversial gay kiss on the SABC1 series Yizo-Yizo. It was the first time South Africa had been shown two black men engaged in a sexual act.
For this storyline, producers reportedly enlisted Wendy Isaack, who was then a legal adviser to the Lesbian and Gay Equality Project. “Gay men are not a homogeneous group. There is a misconception that all gay men are feminine. There isn’t a prototype of a gay man. It’s a sexual orientation, it’s an identity,” Isaack said at the time.
In recent years, the popular soapie Generations introduced a gay couple in the form of Senzo Dlomo and Jason Malinga, played by Thami Mngqolo and Zolisa Xaluva. A kiss shared by the couple sparked outrage and spawned a Facebook group called “We Will Stop Watching Generations if Senzo and Jason continue kissing”. It was billed as the fastest-growing Facebook group South Africa had seen, reportedly swelling by 20 000 members in a matter of three days.
”Accepting that some people are gays and lesbians is another thing, but watching them on our beloved TV soapies is very disappointing. The awareness the script writers are talking about won’t work, instead it will damage the values that we instil in our kids,” one comment on the group’s wall read.
Four years later, a search for the group brings back no results and Generations still ranks as one of South Africa’s best loved TV shows.
Although Twitter was abuzz earlier this year when two men kissed on yet another controversial SABC 1 series, Intersexions, the shock seems to have been less intense than the reaction to the Generations kiss.
Neither show portrays the characters as flamboyant, but as ordinary people who are navigating their feelings in a society where acceptance remains largely elusive.
This is especially true of Intersexions, where one of the men involved is a soccer star who is trying his best to keep his feelings for another man under wraps. Both characters are, in the traditional sense of the word, masculine.
In his critically acclaimed movie Skoonheid, director Oliver Hermanus explored these complexities of homosexuality through the protagonist – a married Afrikaner male living in small-town South Africa.
“He’s homosexual in his true sexual preference. He’s not gay because he doesn’t live a gay lifestyle,” Hermanus says.
These gay themes are more evolved in their portrayal of homosexuality as simply a sexual preference rather than a lifestyle, as Hermanus says. Perhaps the disappearance of the anti-gay Facebook group sparked by the Generations kiss is an indication of how attitudes are changing.
And while there is no research to prove that South Africans are becoming less hardened when it comes to homosexuality, there is no doubt that pop culture is evolving in how it portrays gays.
As Franco recently put it in a statement issued with the release of the gay movie Interior. Leather. Bar, which he co-directed, straight is perhaps the new gay. - Sunday Tribune