Straight-Acting Characters In Stonewall Movie

Let me begin by stating I haven’t seen the film, Stonewall, and I don’t know much about the actual events of the Stonewall riots. How could I? Everyone seems to be at odds with the topic. Tomorrow I’ll post a few things about the Stonewall riots.

I’ve posted before about how so many are livid because they think Stonewall, as a film, is white-washing LGBT history and hurting LGBT culture. Now that kind of thing I have seen before, many times. I’ve seen the cultural appropriation of LGBT people masked in so many ways for monetary gain I don’t think it’s possible to list them all.  

In any event, I don’t want to get off topic. The Stonewall director recently came out with a few comments during an interview that have people even more livid, if that’s possible.

“You have to understand one thing: I didn’t make this movie only for gay people, I made it also for straight people,” he said. “I kind of found out, in the testing process, that actually, for straight people, [Danny] is a very easy in. Danny’s very straight-acting. He gets mistreated because of that. [Straight audiences] can feel for him.”

You can read the rest here.  The comments are very fascinating.

And here’s an excerpt from a scathing review in Vanity Fair. I’m not the biggest fan of Vanity Fair but the review does seem to relay the message gay people are trying to get out there.

Turns out, Stonewall is perhaps even worse than some feared it would be—more offensive, more white-washed, even more hackishly made. It’s so bad that it’s hard to know where to begin a catalogue of the film’s sins. 

You can read more of that here.  

My only comment is that I’ve also read that Stonewall is a dramatization, which coming from a writer’s POV means that it’s been embellished…larger than life. Because that’s what a dramatization is, larger than life. This certainly is not the first time in the history of anything or anyone that a dramatization has misplaced the facts…or twisted and turned them completely around for monetary gain. So in all fairness to Stonewall, there’s that to consider. You’re not supposed to take it seriously. You’re only supposed to be entertained by it the same way you were entertained by Gone With the Wind.

NYT E-Book Article

The other day on Twitter I saw where someone tweeted, “Do people still read magazines and newspapers?” She was going for a laugh with that one.

Well, some still do. I think a good part of that is generational. The only magazine I get now is Architectural Digest and I’m thinking about reading that online, too, next year. However, I haven’t read a print newspaper in years now. I get my news online: local, national, and international.

I have a rental apartment and my newest tenant doesn’t even write checks anymore. He doesn’t have checks. He’s paperless. He’s got a great job and an excellent credit rating. And he does everything online. You won’t see a newspaper or magazine in his apartment either. Again, generational.

So this article about e-books in the NYT doesn’t surprise me, considering the source. What’s even more interesting is that even though the article talks about print books making this huge comeback, it changes course in the end. In fact, I don’t think I’ve seen an argument implode quite like this in a long time.

It is also possible that a growing number of people are still buying and reading e-books, just not from traditional publishers. The declining e-book sales reported by publishers do not account for the millions of readers who have migrated to cheap and plentiful self-published e-books which often cost less than a dollar. 

Well, we all know how much it costs to produce an e-book. There are no returns with e-books, and pre-ordering an e-book is complete waste of time. So it stands to reason that traditional publishing is going to fight to hold on to what they have for as long as they can. Of course many of us have rebelled against that with big trad publishers and we’ve found indie authors and digital only publishers with great books that we love just as much at a fraction of the cost…fairly priced e-books. 

You can read the rest here. Frankly, I’m not sure what’s going to happen with e-books or print books. I do think that print books will survive, for a period of time, with a certain generation. However, I also know they’ll have to rip my iPad and iPhone libraries out of my cold dead hands before I go back to reading print books ever again.

For anyone who disagrees with me I’d like to ask… Would you take your life savings and invest it in a brick and mortar book store where only print books are sold?

Cultural Appropriation of Trolling

Here’s a link to a blog post by someone who is a hybrid author, a blogger, and a former literary agent with Curtis Brown. I think I’ve been following him since the first day he started to blog. If you follow publishing blogs you may have read Bransford before. He’s been around for a while and has a large following in the book community.

I’ll admit that I’ve focused more on LGBT issues in the past few years and haven’t posted much about publishing. And I’ll continue to focus on LGBT issues in the future. I grew jaded with publishing and with the e-book vs print book debate, and even more jaded with the poor information we’ve been getting from so-called publishing professionals, especially literary agents. Or, in some cases, lack of information. However, when I read this blog post by Bransford I thought I’d pass it because it’s a different kind of cultural appropriation than what I usually post about, and it’s publishing related. 

It’s why I find Kanye West’s much-lampooned video for Bound 2 hilarious, which consists almost entirely of him riding a motorcycle with a naked Kim Kardashian in front of images of iconic American landscape, including stampeding white horses in slow motion. He even premiered it on the Ellen DeGeneres show for some reason. You can almost hear Kanye’s challenge to America — you know this is what you want, you know you will eat this up.

This has nothing to do with whether or not you like Kanye. Bransford also presents another example with Jonathan Franzen. Again, they are examples.

You can read it in full here. I’m not going to comment or try to explain the post. It’s worth reading in full and you’ll just have to trust me on that. But more important, every single time I see an author on social media heading into some kind of huge drama designed to get attention so he or she can remain relevant, I’m going to think about this post…and I’m going to smile.