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GENESSA -- WHO ARE YOU?
An Essay About Identity by Gail M Feldman Who are you? No, really! Who are you? Well, okay, whom do you wish to be? Is it possible? Are you already that person just by wishing? The way I see it, the only story worth telling is the story of the conflict between oneself and one's own interests, and others and their interests. Love is the compromise that occurs in this story -- well, it's also the assumption of someone else's interest as one's own. Heroism is the replacement of one with the other. Some people are greedy and others generous; sometimes it has to do with empathy and sometimes it has to do with self-aggrandizement. This is what complicates matters: how can you know what your own interests are, much less when, whether and to what extent to compromise them, unless you know who you are? It gets extra complicated if the society in which you live is convinced, or has even convinced you, that who you are is something bad. Even just being a member of a minority within your society can give you pause about your worth as a person, but being a member of a despised or discriminated-against minority, or even one who simply isn't represented at all in popular culture, of necessity changes how you see who you are, and how you express who you are. Even if you're the most confident person in the world, positive of your intrinsic value to the universe and ready to battle all foes, your plan of attack is shaped by what it is you're planning to attack. Conversely, even if you believe every lie the universe ever dumped on you about yourself, you're going to confirm or counter it somehow. Human beings are born to express who they are, or who they think they are, or who they've been made to think they are, or who they wish they were, or who they want someone else to think they are, and sometimes all of that at once. Invisible minorities have the good and bad luck to be able to choose whether or not to suffer overt discrimination. A dark-skinned person in a society dominated by light-skinned people has no choice; s/he can react in many ways but not by pretending to be white. In a society in which Jews do not wear yellow stars or carry papers identifying them as Jews, they can keep quiet about their Jewishness or be openly Jewish; a gay person can be closeted or out. What risk such choices entail depend upon variables that can vary themselves into oblivian in the blink of an eye. Today's permission for gays to marry can be revoked tomorrow; freedom of religion came perilously close to revocation in the United States during the Bush administration, and the changing of the guard, while shifting some support away from those determined to impose their beliefs on the world, has by no means quieted or quashed them. Yet, for invisible minorities, things are, in general, better than they ever have been. This doesn't mean the situation is good; what it means is that it's been a lot worse. Throughout the ages, people who were different and could hide their differences for the most part did so. Gays stuck in repressive circumstances married members of the opposite sex (sometimes, but I suspect not usually, in a "lavender" marriage, in which both partners were gay), had children and either did not act upon their attraction to members of the same sex or did so with great care not to be discovered. Jews during the Inquisition kissed the cross or were burned at the stake for refusing to do so. (Gays, even Christian ones, were thrown into the fire first and thus acquired the derogatory nickname they bear to this day: faggots.) The repression of identity needed just to survive doubtless took a dreadful emotional and psychological toll. Not having lived in, for example, the Middle Ages, I don't know for sure how people under this kind of pressure coped (yes, I have experienced discrimination, and it wasn't pretty, but I don't think it's comparable); I do know that in relatively modern times, invisible minorities who have had to suppress major elements of their identities and eschew self-expression nonetheless have found outlets, vocationally or avocationally. Don't get me wrong: not everyone who has something to hide is a victim, and not every age required that something now considered vile be hidden. The holocaust didn't happen in a vacuum; there is nothing intrinsically wrong with the German people that isn't potentially wrong with everyone else. Those who would've become concentration camp guards if only they had been lucky enough to be born in the right place at the right time now find outlets for their sadism by becoming prison guards (not to say all prison guards are sadists, but a sadist might well be drawn to that line of work) or vivisectionists (for whom I make no such disclaimer). Not everyone goes into his or her ideal profession, either, nor can everyone afford to have a gratifying hobby (although whistling is free). (It takes less social standing and education to become a serial killer than to become a prison guard; on the other hand, you have a lot more to hide, and your audience tends not to survive your self-expression. This is, of course, irrelevant to the topic at hand; there is a difference between having something to hide because you have an urge to hurt people and having something to hide because the society in which you live has criminalized the very essence of your being.) But for those who for whatever reason are able (or motivated enough to become able) to pursue what they will, work and play can become valuable venues for self-expression, and those venues are all the more valuable to those who have been denied the right simply to say or show who they truly are. Thus the arts (particularly the performing arts, and even more especially the thespian arts) and the world of entertainment are a magnet for two traditionally invisible minorities: Jews and gays (which groups are, it should be pointed out, not mutually exclusive). Neither group is sufficiently portrayed (in television drama, for example), although gay characters are beginning to emerge as real people and not just comics or victims: the very roles assigned to Jews in previous decades. Among cast and crew, and in administration, these two groups have found a home. This alarms some folks: Jews and gays have taken over Hollywood! Well, I have deliberately misspoken by saying groups; properly, I should have said members of these two groups. The alarmed ones can't tell the difference; three Jews in one place are a takeover; two gays in one place are the Apocalypse. (One Jew and one gay? A conspiracy!) It has been noted that Hollywood (meaning the film industry that flourished there for the better part of the 20th century, and yes, I am aware that I am focusing largely on one area of a much larger entity, or conglomeration of entities, sometimes loosely referred to as arts and entertainment) was virtually created by Jews. It has not always been noted with admiration, and if you have the stomach to listen to the American Nazi Party and other White Power-type organizations (and individuals influenced by same) you will "learn" that this is how Jews control the known universes (and I keep wondering what happened to my cut). Not all of the Jewish entrepreneurial fervor that found itself poured into the making of Hollywood came strictly from a need for self-expression; Jews had economic restrictions to overcome. Even people who didn't intentionally discriminate against Jews out of sheer bigotry might be loathe to hire people who went home early on Fridays and wouldn't work on Saturdays (in the age of the six-day work week -- but then, ask Steven Hill why he only lasted through one season of "Mission Impossible"; it wasn't for lack of talent or dedication). Even a Jew unobservant enough to turn his back on the Sabbath did face job discrimination unless he was willing and able to pass. (Of course, it was not the Chassidim who raced west; that wagon train was full of secular Jews out to prove they could compete in a goysiche world by being more goyische than the goyim; who wrote "White Christmas"? A Jew! But then -- and we'll get to this -- who was the biggest, most studly hunk in the films of the 1950s? Rock Hudson.) What, then, could be more enticing than a brand new industry where everyone could start out on the same footing, bringing with them more or less the same mixture of ignorance and inspiration, inventing a brand new wheel (reel)? Later, the Holocaust provided an influx of Jewish refugees from the European cinema to enrich the still-new and everchanging American film industry from all angles: imagine a world with no Billy Wilder or with no Peter Lorre! Certainly gays also participated in the forming of this new dreamworld, but while a Goldwyn or a Meyer (or a Bochco or a Wolf) is obviously a Jew (just as a Griffith or a Fairbanks isn't), there is no homosexual surname, and folks weren't talkin'. Yet surely the heightened need for self-expression that comes from self-repression sent gays in droves to already-liberal Hollywood, where, despite Los Angeles' history of laws against "masquerading," there was an unspoken policy of keeping any such knowledge unspoken; far from wanting to out anyone, studios actively arranged "dates" for actors they knew were gay, to preserve their public images. Jews for the most part chose to battle the system either by resisting, instead making films for the Yiddish-speaking market (mostly back east) or by setting out to prove to the world that Jews were "normal" (read "not different," which meant secular and in some cases even anti-Semitic or at least self-denying), making films (and later television) about everything, anything, except Judaism and Jews. Thus Jews found outlets for self-expression by deliberately not expressing themselves, just as so many gay men became hetero sex symbols (lesbians mostly got to be funny, although undoubtedly there have been lesbian actresses whose screen personae thrilled the hearts of many a straight man). Today the closet is emptying out fast, despite the fact that gays are still assaulted and even murdered just for being themselves; synagogues are still being desecrated and even outside the middle east Jews enjoy more dubious physical safety than most of us like to admit, but in most of the western world we don't have to survive by passing. Even so, Jews and gays continue to be overrepresented in terms of participation, and underrepresented in terms of portrayal, in the arts and in the entertainment industry (which, as you know, overlap). But while Jews are still singing "White Christmas," gays are openly advocating for the right to be who they are and to be portrayed in all the diversity of their being. Until recently, the only gays seen in mainstream film were seen in stories about how tough it is to be gay, or as funny sidekicks; Jews were either Holocaust victims or, well, funny sidekicks. This carried over to television. Now we can finally see gays as doctors, plumbers, lawyers, criminals, cops, stupid, smart, funny, serious, fey, butch, neither... in other words, normal human beings, no more or less messed up than anyone else. Graham Norton's simpering scatology may represent a portion of the gay population, but so does the hunky heroism of the pansexual Captain Jack Harkness thanks to the megatalented (and strong gay-rights advocate) John Barrowman. (The late John Inman's contribution to gay character portrayal may be viewed more kindly now than it has been, not just considering what little choice he -- and the writers -- had, but also in light of the doors -- yes, closet doors! -- he opened.) When will it be okay to show a Jew being a Jew? Gay writers are writing realistic gays; straight writers have no choice but to do likewise. When Jewish writers write realistic Jews, will non-Jewish writers follow suit? No one knows. It hasn't happened yet.  |
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