With Hirsch On Top, October SMA Returns To Normal

In a show of force, Emile Hirsch this month showed that he can still dictate the terms of the competition, even though he was demoted to second place on the Sexiest Males Alive (SMA) list for August. He may have been the standardbearer, but Zac Efron still had to convince me more why Emile should not retake the top spot, than why he was the right guy to remain atop the SMA. Zac predictably failed at a task that was outside of his control, which means the regular order is reinstated.

Elsewhere it was the revenge of the nerd (or rather, geek) as Jesse Eisenberg saw a massive fifteen spot rise due to the release of Zombieland, to take the Climber Of The Month title. At the opposite end of the scale Daniel Radcliffe’s dramatic thirteen spot slide to #48 stands out, in a month of fairly modest downward mobility. In a development now fairly typical for the Harry Potter star, just when we thought he was about to find his footing, he’s in dire straits yet again. Speaking of Harry Potter, Radcliffe’s co-star Freddie Stroma got a very short run, and he joins the ranks of the relegated, alongside Cody Linley and Chris Pine. This month’s sole returnee is Tottenham footballer Gareth Bale. We also have two newcomers with us this month, Nick Jonas and Matt Lanter.

As always, the changes on the list are usually caused by any particular guy being considered by me to be relatively more attractive than he was considered last month. That, however, of course doesn’t necessarily mean that any of the other people on this list have become markedly less attractive, only that they perhaps have not been as good at getting my attention lately.

With that said, let’s break it down:

#1-10: It may seem like an odd thing to say after he was actually dethroned in August, but Emile Hirsch nevertheless has become something of a default choice for the SMA top spot. It’s almost a kind of loyalty thing. Which means that Zac Efron, or any other contender, will probably have to make me dislike Hirsch in some way, in order to take permanent hold of the top spot. I’d call that practically impossible. On the place below Efron, who still has nothing to be ashamed of at #2, Nick Hoult surged from #8, much due to the pictures accompanying this month’s interview with him in Out Magazine. He’d look good in anything, but that Mad Men-look really suits him. Zac Hanson’s second straight #5 showing is impressive for someone I once inexplicably declared could never really be considered hot, and Luke Pasqualino too is holding on well, despite the fact that there are still several months until the new Skins season is on.

It also is worth noting that Raviv Ullman is finally back in the top ten. After he posted a personal best #5 showing back in May, he has struggled to get back into the top tier. I have seen nothing but stills from his Lifetime sitcom Rita Rocks, but it was still sufficiently enticing to make him place at #8. There’s just something about that smile. That said, Ullman had to see Ryan Sheckler get the better of him, with the former MTV regular, now plain skaterboy three spots, to #7. This list often comes down to have done the best job keeping themselves on my radar lately, and to this end, this picture. It’s not new, but I hadn’t seen it before. Also, it’s definitely a plus that his awful tattoos are not as prominently displayed. I guess I say this a lot, but why do wonderful guys feel the need to mess up their body like that?

The rise of Sheckler and Ullman are the only plausible reasons for Logan Lerman’s slight dip. I never got around to seeing Gamer, and I don’t think My One and Only will be released to Norwegian movie theaters, but I’m not afraid that this could be the start of a more serious slide for him. In the battle for Skins honors, Mitch Hewer comes in third yet again, but I think it’s worth remembering what a remarkably steady run the young has had on the SMA. With the recent decline of Jesse McCartney, he is now one of a relatively few people who have consistently placed in the top ten throughout the SMA’s history. He’s holding on this month, too, is bQarely. But don’t count him out just yet.

#11-20: It’s official: I love Jesse Eisenberg. He may not be your average heartthrob, but I now realize I think he’s genuinely attractive, in addition to being one of the funniest, most charming young actors around (Michael Cera has does of the same things to me). Climbing fifteen spot is not unprecedented on this list (Leonardo DiCaprio and Corbin Bleu have done it before), but that doesn’t mean it’s not a very impressive feat. Considering this month’s succes is based on me watching the first ten minutes of the very sweet Adventureland, and that I still haven’t seen him in Zombieland, I wouldn’t bet that he has reached his peak yet. Speaking of which, he actually debuted at #10 on the very first SMA. If neither of his adventures of this summer do the trick, I could of course go back to watching The Squid and the Whale again.

The other noteworthy development in the second tier is the aforementioned seeming implosion of Jesse McCartney. He drops out of the top ten for the first time, to #12. This is really a test of that very same loyalty that I feel for people like Emile Hirsch and Zac Hanson. It really pains me to say this about someone who has meant so much to me (as chronicled in my Early Gay Crushes post about him), but Jesse simply hasn’t been looking his best lately. I won’t give up on him however, and I like his music as much as ever.  Also on the music quota, arrives Nick Jonas, the youngest Jonas Brother, brain of the band, and newly re-emerged solo artist. It was not the news of his Nick Jonas & The Administration side project that secured him his solid SMA debut, however. Rather, his somewhat disengaged, dry delivery strikes me as the funniest in their group’s generally awful Disney Channel sitcom Jonas, which hit Norwegian television screens this month. For a guy like him, any exposure is good exposure. Even if he’s back to dating Miley Cyrus.

Speaking of Cyrus, her co-star in Hannah Montana: The Movie, Lucas Till, climbed three spots in a month in which those remaining in the second tier held their own, at best. Charlie Hunnam pretty much erased his August gains, falling four spots to #19, and both Kevin Zegers, Chris Egan and Tyler Hoechlin are also sliding. For Zegers this marks his first setback in several months, but he’s still only back at his July level. Old faithful Ryan Donowho, as usual one of those who gained least exposure, stays in at #20.

#21-30: With both band’s now having two members each on the SMA, the battle between Hanson and Jonas Brothers can begin in earnest. We already have the rivalry between current and former Skins people. amd before Chris Egan completely demolished the opposition, Mitch Firth, Rhys Wakefield and Jason Smith gave him a fight for the Home and Away honors. This week’s simultaneous rise of Taylor Hanson and Joe Jonas, leaving them within modest climbing distance of each other, should make for an interesting duel in the months to come. I’m not exactly what’s behind Taylor’s recent elevation, but I suspect it has something to do with my general love for Hanson, and I wouldn’t rule out that Zac’s SMA success somehow is trickling down to his older brother. In the case of Joe Jonas, the honor will have to be shared between the family sitcom, and my work on a piece about the reception of the group’s most recent album.

In other positive news, High School Musical’s Matt Prokop, takes a long step towards nullifying his dramatic August drop. At #29, winning nine spots, he still has a way to go to replicate his #19 showing from July, but he’s off to a great start. I’m not sure why he’s rebounding so fast, but often when these things happen, it’s due to me being a bit hasty in writing people off. It works the other way, too. People who climb significantly, have a tendency to come down to earth relatively quickly. Therefore, it’s a very good sign that Prokop’s fellow HSMer, Corbin Bleu, who rose an incredible nineteen spots in August, still isn’t down more than five spots in October, landing at #30.

Among the usual suspects – Jamie Bell, Alex Pettyfer, Ed Speleers – all this month’s changes should be considered to be within the margin of natural developments. They generally tend to come in some where in twenties, and now they do so again. Pettyfer, for instance, who actually started off as a top ten contender during the summer of 2008, this month’s dives a fairly predicatable, and thus undramatic, five spots to #27. Speelers small slide should be viewed the same way, although he should really be credited with staying so high on the list, considering that his only meaning full credits, in the awful Eragon and on the cover Attitude Magazine, are long since in the past. Chris Lowell may theoretically have an easier time getting on my radar, but since I’ve never watched Private Practice, his could be subject to probably temporary slides as this month, to #26.

#31-40: The 30’s may have their own small roster of ususal suspects – Leonardo DiCaprio, Sean Faris, Adam Brody – but they have in common that they were 20’s contenders not long ago, and could sonn be again. Faris’ presence is still mostly due to Life as we know it, while Brody’s stint on The O.C. kind of works like a bulwark against the crappy movies he have taken to starring in, like Mr. & Mrs. Smith, or Smiley Face. Neither should have reason to worry about sliding into the next tier, even though Brody faces a drop this month.

For that, I would rather keep an eye on Dan Stevens, of The Line of Beauty fame. Like Bleu now, Stevens held up surprisingly in his second month, but he now is paying a prize, being relegated to the fourth tier. Dropping by nine could well be a sign of worse things to come. At the opposite end of the scale, we welcome 90210′s Matt Lanter to the SMA. He has been a contender practically since this list was born, but for some reason it took him a while to make. He caught my attention back in 2005, when he repeatedly took his shirt off in the otherwise forgetable Geena Davis presidential drama Commander in Chief, but his face is actually even better. If he can manage to hang on for a while (and if he can The CW to renew his seriously struggling show), he may be one to watch.

Also on the positive side, Ed Westwick continues to climb, thus at least reducing the constant risk that he will fall off the list in the immediate future, as he has had a tendency to do previously. Mitch Fitch, too, takes a step away from the brink in October, hoping to get back some of the traction he got when he co-starred in my Chris Egan EGC piece in early summer. Finally, Cristiano Ronaldo looks like he might have caught a break, climbing five spots to #40. He is set to be the next Calvin Klein, which may well turn out to be a way up for the Madridbased footballer.

#41-5o: Returning, lazingly, to the topic of usual suspects, even the final tiers has its fair share – among them Ryan Phillippe, Rhys Wakefield and Brady Corbet. But just like their higher-up colleagues, they only remain usual suspects until the slide further down, and for instance of these people, that means getting booted from the list altogether. Once you’re off the list, and unless you’re named Daniel Radcliffe, Ed Westwick or Joseph Gordon-Levitt, it can be really hard to mount a comeback. The three US’s above may have become something close to immune, though. Corbet in particular has been in this challenging situation over and over again, only to fight to live yet another month. The downside to all of this may be that they are now so closely identified with the bottom tier that it’s hard to seem them make a credible run for a post higher up in the hierarchy, so to speak. For Radcliffe, the serial returnee, are once again starting to look rather bleak.

Welsh footballer Gareth Bale is this week’s sole returnee, at a quite decent #42, but if he is to climb further, he needs to convince Harry Redknapp he’s the right man for Spurs. Also too early to tell with regards to place in the hierarchy is music guy Dougie Poynter, although his modest gain is an obvious positive. Apart from him, the forties rather predictably consists of people on the decline, from sportspeople Fernando Torres and Rafael Nadal, to singers Shad Moss and Jay Brannan. If I were to guess however, I would say that Torres’s and Brannan’s long-term prospects looks better though, because of loyalty and/0r sheer familiarity. Torres belongs to Liverpool, and thus will always have a place in my heart, while Brannan seems to have permanently settled in my ears, due to singer/songwriter excellence. The case of Hanson should provide ample evidence that audio sexiness can easily be converted into SMA stardom, if your looks are also above average.

1. Emile Hirsch (Previous ranking: 2)
2. Zac Efron (1)
3. Nick Hoult (8)
4. Hunter Parrish (3)
5. Zac Hanson (5)
6. Luke Pasqualino (7)
7. Ryan Sheckler (10)
8. Raviv Ullman (13)
9. Logan Lerman (4)
10. Mitch Hewer (9)
11. David Gallagher (11)
12. Jesse McCartney (6)
13. Chris Egan (16)
14. Kevin Zegers (12)
15. Jesse Eisenberg (30)
16. Nick Jonas (new)
17. Tyler Hoechlin (14)
18. Lucas Till (21)
19. Charlie Hunnam (15)
20. Ryan Donowho (17)
21. Taylor Hanson (26)
22. Gaspard Ulliel (18)
23. Joe Jonas (29)
24. Ed Speleers (20)
25. Chris Lowell (19)
26. Jamie Bell (23)
27. Alex Pettyfer (22)
28. Jonathan Taylor Thomas (28)
29. Matt Prokop (38)
30. Corbin Bleu (25)
31. Sean Faris (34)
32. William Moseley (27)
33. Dan Stevens (24)
34. Leonardo DiCaprio (33)
35. Joseph Gordon Levitt (34)
36. Adam Brody (31)
37. Matt Lanter (new)
38. Ed Westwick (41)
39. Mitch Firth (43)
40. Cristiano Ronaldo (45)
41. Shad Moss (36)
42. Gareth Bale (RE)
43. Dougie Poynter (46)
44. Rhys Wakefield (44)
45. Rafael Nadal (42)
46. Fernando Torres (40)
47. Jay Brannan (39)
48. Daniel Radcliffe (35)
49. Ryan Phillippe (47)
50. Brady Corbett (48)

The Significance Of Stephen Gately

As a former Boyzone fan, I was of course deeply saddened by last week’s news that the group’s co-singer, Stephen Gately, had died. I say former not because I need to distance myself from my fandom, but rather because I haven’t felt the need to listen to them for years. There’s something about not really appreciating something until it’s taken away from you, however. I’m not more of a former Boyzone fan that I have been listening to them endlessly ever since the story broke a week ago.

I suppose it was this sense of loss that made me think that Peter Robinson, the music blogger of The Guardian, was so obviously right in headlining his memorial posting  Stephen Gately summed up Boyzone: cute, cheerful and clearly having a ball. It seemed at the same time like a reasonably respectful yet slightly patronizing way to frame the career of a group so safely recognizable that will they never be canonized, not even within the boyband genre, but with whom this was not the the time for harshness. But did Robinson nail it? Was Stephen Gately really like Boyzone? And did Boyzone fit his description?

Neh. You may be able to summarize Boyzone through Gately, but Robinson’s description is not necessarily fit to describe neither of them. Cute is not the important adjective here, whether you’re thinking of their sometimes charming pop earnestness or the uncontested fact that at least a couple of the group’s members were very easy on the eye. I’m also in no position to know whether Gately enjoyed being a member of the group, but I have no reason to doubt it. It’s the cheerful I’m reacting to.

I’m not saying that Boyzone’s songs had some underappreciated emotional complexity or depth,  and I know that their roster of hits stretched further than just balladeering. Still Robinson’s claim strikes me as a little odd. It wasn’t Picture of You, Together or comeback single Love You Anyway that defined Boyzone. It was Father and Son, Baby Can I Hold You, All That I Need, Words, I Love The Way You Love Me, Every Day I Love You and No Matter What. Ballads all, and none of them particularly cheerful. That was how it was suppose to be. Boyzone was targeted at hormonal teens, sure. But musically, they were just as clearly tuned to not scare away a somewhat older (female?) audience. They didn’t make pleasant and predictable cover versions so that young music fans could be introduced to Bee Gees, Cat Stevens or Tracy Chapman. They did whatever they could get away with without alienating either of the core audiences. Boyzone was never meant to be like Backstreet Boys, or even Take That. More than cheerful, they were safe.

And in all of this, Stephen Gately was never the frontman. On songs not brimming with cheerfulness in the first place, he was tasked with channeling the musical earnestness Ronan Keating’s softly nasal lead vocals hadn’t already absorbed. Gately was that other even prettier guy who had to do something special with his ooh’s and aah’s in order to grab the spotlight. But this is also part of the reason why Stephen was always my Boyzone favorite: He was not Ronan Keating. Without necessarily being Ronan’s exact opposite, you never got the feeling that Gately felt he was too big for Boyzone, as you could sometimes feel about the entrepreneurially career-savvy Keating. After a couple of years of Boyzone success which I suspect he had a hand in making happen even marketing-wise, Keating went on to mentor the next generation Irish boyband. As we now know, Westlife ended up eclipsing The Beatles as the group with the most straight-to-#1 hits in the UK. Gately seemingly had none of that strong ambition, which made him easier to sympathize with.

And he was gay. That wouldn’t in itself have been a reason to prefer him to the somewhat slicker Keating, had it not been for the small fact that it was actually quite important. Not because I was gay myself (I didn’t admit it until years later). Rather, it was because, as British gaymag Attitude pointed out in their fine memorial post, Stephen Gately should be attributed with busting the myth that having a gay band member would somehow mean commercial suicide for a boy band. (Please ignore the oddness in that such a perception of the markets seems to basically ignore that the gay audience often is one of the most loyal elemts of most boybands’ fanbase.) I agree with The Times’ Tim Teeman that it should not be held  against a gay role model that he was basically forced out of the closet because one of Britain’s notoriously sleazy tabloids threatened to blow it open for him. To be pushed into such a visible and symbolically important role takes a lot of courage in its own way. Young pop gays like Will Young, Gareth Gates, Mark Feehily (Westlife) and others should be very grateful.

This is what lead me to a fair bit of post-rationalizing; but suddenly Robertson’s claim didn’t seem like quite as much of a stretch.  Didn’t something happen to Gately’s appearance after he came out? Whether within Boyzone or outside, he seemed more confident, and – yes – even cheerful at times. His muted Boyzone persona underwent a change, for the better, after the big broke ten years ago. He was free to embrace his passions,  and as Robinson points out, he became something of an ambassador for Disney.

This is how Stephen Gately should be remembered, no matter how many outrageously bigoted column inches may be churned out by the likes of Jan Moir, who took the occasion of Gately’s death to expel the ‘myth’ of the ‘happy-ever-after of civil partnerships’ without a shred of evidence to back it up. Moir may force us to embrace him even tighter as a gay pioneer, but as time goes by, he should also be recognized for how he and Boyzone helped shape the British 1990’s.

The Nobel Peace Prize: Is It Too Soon?

Out of respect for Hillary Clinton and the Clinton legacy. I never got myself to fully choose between Clinton and Barack Obama in the Democratic presidential primaries, once my favorite candidate, John Edwards (yeah, I know) dropped out. But even if I never wholeheartedly took sides (although I leaned toward Obama, and endorsed him for the general election), I always felt the need to defend him against allegations from diehard Clintonites that he was all talk and no action, or that it was somehow naive to hope that his idealistic rhetoric would actually make it into political reality. It cost very little, because I actually believed in him, deeply. And ten months into his first term, that belief has not been seriously reduced. I think this is because my trust in him never resembled that uncritical caricature pushed by Clinton’s most ardent supporters. Oddly, that caricature is more easily found in the way the Nobel Committee is justifying giving its 2009 Peace Price to Obama.

Thorbjorn Jagland, chairman of the committee, has said that the decision to give Obama the award represents a return to the initial of Alfred Nobel, that the award not necessarily be given as a kind of lifetime achievement award. Rather, it is to be given to the one person who has given the largest contribution to keep the world safe and peaceful over the last year. I see little wrong in such a criterion, and I’m happy that the committee decided to be open about on which grounds Obama receives the award. Still, this criterion means the the recipient’s contributions needs to be very clear, or at least, it needs to be very clear how his current work may lay the groundwork for important progress on matters of peace and security in the future. On that note, I think the commitee’s reasoning is perhaps overly optimistic.

Obama no doubt deserves credit for having spelled out ambition of nuclear disarmament, a stronger focus on critical dialogue with potentially threatening states like Iran and North Korea, and his efforts to reach out to the Muslim world, for putting pressure on Israel and Palestine to recomitt to a Middle Eastern peace process. But does the sum of all this really, like Jagland suggested at a press conference, mean that no politician has done more than Barack Obama to promote peace over the last year?

Because it’s still so early in his first term, to answer yes to that question, you have to assume that one man, and one country, holds the key to peace all around the world. I don’t think Obama thinks that. He has certainly made an effort, and stretched his broad international popularity and gravitas thinly across a very ambitious foreign policy agenda. But if we were to accept the premise that the peace prize should enhance Obama’s authority and ability to carry out his agenda, it’s somewhat troubling that most of his effort have so fallen short. Israel has refused to halt the construction of new settlements, and it seems increasingly unlikely that Congress will grant Obama significant leverage in the negotiations meant to result in a new international accord on climate change, during the conference in Copenhagen in December. (That said, Democratic Senators Barbara Boxer and John Kerry just this week started work a Senate climate change bill to accompany the Waxman-Markey bill that very narrowly passed the House in June). Also, it’s not diplomatic outreach, so much more troops, that have characterized the Obama Administration’s line on both Iraq and Aghanistan. To reward Obama for having ‘changed the tone’ of international politics is a somewhat weak justification to begin with. The actual results he has gained thus far only makes it seem even weaker.

Whatever one might think of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, here too the timing seems a little odd. The announcement was made just as Obama is pondering whether to commit several thounsand more combat troops in Afghanistan, and as commander-in-chief, he presides over no less than two wars. I supported and continue to support the engagement in Aghanistan, even as the situation looks increasingly dour, and the next couple of years may be just as much about holding on to the positive results achieved in the first few years of the war, more than the broad-based democratization/counterterrorism agenda that originally intended. That said, I do wonder how awarding Obama with the peace prize will play in that region. ‘War for peace’ has always been a controversial argument. Particularly as an argument for awarding someone a peace prize.

For these and others, the award could easily be read as something of a political move. If by political we’d meant that the Nobel Committee also wanted to encourage and recognize the importance of certain political goals (like, say, diplomacy or nuclear proliferation) this could have been defended by pointing to previous winners, although the connection is somewhat unconvincing. The problem is that because the award is given for such almost idealistic reasons, it may be perceived more as a rebuke of the go-it-alone, international-law-mocking presidency of George W. Bush than as a deeply felt acknowledgment of Barack Obama’s accomplishments or stated goals. It definitely is welcome that the United States under Obama have opened up more to the world, and stepped away from the mix of unilateralism, intimidation and lack of respect for allies that characterized much of the Bush era. But to make this – developments that in all fairness were partly enacted during the second Bush term – a possible interpretation of why Obama is awarded with the peace prize, is problematic for the Nobel Committee, which needs to be perceived as above-the-fray in day-to-day politics.

Also, I can’t help but be afraid of what this might mean for Obama’s domestic agenda. The Republican Party have, with some success, tried to paint Obama both as a ‘celebrity politician’ who is better at making speeches than making change, and as one who travels abroad to apologize for past mistakes instead of standing up for American values. Both these arguments are of course utterly silly, but I’m not sure whether a peace prize not yet backed up with concrete political results, will help his standing with on-the-fence voters. And considering how many prominent conservatives cheered Chicago’s loss in the contest for the 2016 Olympics last week, my guess is that this international recognition of the US having turned the page on George W. Bush, will be met with nothing but contempt in those circles.

All this is not to say that I don’t congratulate President Obama on winning. I just hope that the next couple will bring results that backs up the award. In any case, I think he could have gotten it a couple of years from now anyway.

Is Jonas Brothers Getting The Hanson Treatment?

That was the question I kept asking myself while I was reading through a series of reviews of Jonas Brothers’ June release Lines, Vines and Trying Times recently, compiled by the aggregator site Metacritic. To answer this question however, I have to define what is meant by the term Hanson treatmenmt. The answer goes way back.

Hanson, of course, debuted in 1997 with their multi-million selling album  Middle of Nowhere, propelled by the incredible success of its irresistible lead single, MMMBop. Despite being grouped in with a bunch of other all-male pop acts of its time as a boyband - think Backstreet Boys or N*Sync – Hanson actually wrote many of their own songs and played their own instruments, which made the comparison with corporately constructed boyband projects a little unfair. Still,  the teen market was quickly soaked with a small flood of hastily put-together albums – a collection of demo tapes, a concert album, and even a Christmas record – before Hanson disappeared from the scene, to work on their follow-up to Nowhere. Year 2000, three full years later, saw the arrival of This Time Around, a record that was fairly well-received, although reviewers never forgot to point out the lack of a MMMBop-size smash hit. A fair point, that wouldn’t have annoyed me so much if it weren’t also a sign of the slight condescension that greeted the Hanson comeback.

On This Time Around, much of the catchy but goofy pop intuitiveness of the debut – most notably songs like MMMBop and Man From Milwaukee – gave way to a darker lyrical landscape, draped in a more ambitious, sometimes downright bombastic sound – as evidenced in Save Me and This Time Around. This then prompted something close to knee-jerk dismissals from some critics, along the lines of ‘Why couldn’t Hanson have kept to the bubble gum pop music they do best, instead of trying to grow up too fast and be all things to all people?‘. My point here is not to say that such a criticism is illegitimate. I still appreciate Middle of Nowhere just as much as their later works. Rather, there is something about the tone of the argument. By arguing that Hanson should have kept to making the same kind of pleasurable but utterly unambitious pop songs, these critics elegantly set up Middle of Nowhere as a masterpiece of a pop sub-genre that they were at the same time implicitly belittling. That way, they could embrace Middle of Nowhere without actually having to embrace it, because they made sure to frame it in condescending terms.

Which brings us to Jonas Brothers, and Lines, Vines and Trying Times. Reading a bunch of reviews in short order, I was not only struck by how the critics pretty much all picked up on the same things about the album – the digs at Joe Jonas’ ex-girlfriend in Much Better, the implicit sexual frustration content in Poison Ivy – but also how nearly everyone framed its diversity and genre-confusion as a sign of how the brothers were now trying to break free of their Disney heartthrob status. Again, I’m not necessarily saying these are not valid points, they are just not very interesting. The almost therapeutical interpretation takes attention away from the actual musical product, and anyone who has actually listened to their previous records should know that they haven’t been immune from playing with their officially projected image before. You just have to listen to Hollywood or Video Girl for examples. Plus, the perceived novelty of what’s framed as a rebellion against the constraints of their sound and image, gives critics an opportunity to embrace previous Jonas Brothers incarnations that they can’t really get themselves to fully embrace in a non-ironic way. In the end it feels somewhat reductionist, just like with Hanson at the start of the decade.

Thus, Bilboard’s ‘Don’t be so quick to grow up, guys‘, intended as a compliment on what works on Lines, could just as easily be read as a write-off. Likewise, I’m not sure if it’s the intention of Allmusic’s review, and it’s not as blunt, but ‘Lines is designed to showcase a mature Jonas Brothers, who wear their maturation in an increased stylistic range, and fussed-over arrangements that lend this a stiffness of a band well beyond their years‘ still smacks more of condescension than substantive criticism. First, it reduces the band to a kind of focus-grouped marketing tool, and second, it rather crudely proceeds to use their young age against them. I’m not saying that the conclusion is necessarily horribly wrong, but I disagree with the tone and reasoning behind it.

Lines, Vines and Trying Times actually is a messy and uneven pop record, and I do agree that Jonas Brothers are better at crafting straightforward pop songs and the occasional power ballad (check out the truly horrendous rap-rocker Don’t Charge Me For The Crime, or the country-influenced What Did I Do To Your Heart for evidence of the perils of veering too far out of your comfort zone) that their previous two records were brimming with, than this year’s anything-goes approach. And there are several decent tracks here; from the collaboration with Miley Cyrus on Before The Storm; to the funky World War III and Paranoid; the vintage Jonas Brothers rocker Poison Ivy; and the much-hyped Much Better. In total, I guess that means I’m mostly in line with critics, except for one thing: I don’t think the weaker parts of Lines is due to artistic growing pains, just like I would not (even implicitly) argue that their previous albums worked because that’s the kind of music people their age are most qualified to make, or whatever.

At least, the direct comparisons to Hanson were fewer this time around (pun unintended). Of course, earlier comparisons were both evident and not exactly discouraged by the band itself (complete with allusions to a battledance against Hanson in the song That’s Just The Way We Roll on Jonas Brothers), but they should stop nonetheless. Much as it saddens me, Hanson’s stint on the world stage pretty much ended with Middle of Nowhere, while Jonas Brothers may still be laying the groundwork for continued tween world dominance. With that important distinction in place, we might also hope that fewer comparisons in the future may even mean that the Hanson treatment soon will be just a distant memory – for both bands.

Queer, There And Everywhere

I was so happy to read Benoit Denizet-Lewis’ piece on young gay teens in a preview for this weekend’s New York Times Sunday Magazine. Denizet-Lewis, a former writer with young gay mag XY reports, rather upbeat, on how the schoolyard has now become another possible beacon of freedom and self-expression for gay kids in middle school. While never blind to the homophobia that still thrives somewhere on the outer reaches of his article’s universe (and even within it at times, containing stories of verbal abuse of one of the story’s informants), his project is a perhaps even trickier one than the usual story about the hardships of the school gay: To make us revise that perception.

This is kind of scary to admit, but still: It actually took me a while to accept that that was the story’s premise – that more gay kids live comfortably out lives now than before. Not only because I tend to be skeptical of trend stories like this one, but more importantly because I had become so accustomed to the harder stories that I instinctively feared that a story making the contrary case would end up making the problem seem smaller than it is. My attitude of course is one step on the way to apathy: You accept the grim reality as so unchangeable you can’t even see change is coming. At best, this means you’re missing out on positive societal trends. In the worst case scenario, you yourself end up sabotaging that change, by continuing to push an insufficiently nuanced view of reality. Luckily, I’m not there yet, and Denizet-Lewis made me take a few steps back.

One of the many interesting things the article does is to discuss and show how these young people communicate their sexual orientations amongst themselves, and how they, as perhaps the first gay generation ever, demand to be treated the same way by their parents, dating-wise, as a straight teenager would have been. In one of several scenes that are both moving and funny, Denizet-Lewis observes how Ely, 14,  is negotiating with his mostly understanding mom the do’s and don’ts of having his boyfriend over to visit. I probably shouldn’t feel proud on his (their) behalf, but was just so moving to read this passage, simply because it could just as well pass as a discussion between a straight girl and her mom:

Ely: So, can we hang out in my room?

Mother: I don’t trust you two alone in there. Period.

Ely: What about if there are no body parts touching?

Mother: You don’t have that kind of self-control.

Ely: Yes, I do!

Mother: No you don’t. How old is he again?

Ely: 15.

Mother: And he has a shaved head and piercings everywhere. Is this who you really want to date?

In another striking paragraph, we observe a young gay guy, Justin, and his straight girl friends as they move around the school, more or less subtly pointing out where they think their schoolmates fall on the straight/gay spectrum. It’s a sweet scene for several reasons. First, for the sheer fact that it shows that gays that can be like that and still be in a supportive environment. Second, it is a scene that definitely establishes that we’re dealing with kids here. In a bit of really clever writing, Denizet-Lewis seemingly captures that combination of self-consciousness, giggly insecurity and plainly short attention spans that often characterize people at that age. It’s done in a gentle way that never seems to be over their heads, only a sign that they trust each other so much that their behavior is the most natural thing in the world.

There so incredibly many reasons why I would not want to be 13 or 14 again. As I’ve written about before, these were the years when I had my first serious gay crushes, which was lovely in a sort of intuitively liberating way. But it was also very, very confusing. I knew no one who was gay, and I barely dared think of my feelings as gay. I imagine anyone who knows how all-encompassing a crush can be can imagine how hard it was to reconcile my feelings with something instinctively didn’t want to be. That’s another reason why I loved this story: I can only imagine how relieved I would have felt if something had shown me a similar story back in 1999. Stories like this one actually helped me even as I was coming three years ago, at the not-very-teenagery age of 21. Time Magazine had run a cover story on the so-called Gay Straight Alliance the year before, and it really resonated with me as I was trying to convince myself gayness was nothing to be afraid of.

Identifying with these 13 or 14 years-olds, then, has less to do with wanting to be young again, even though a longer gay life in a welcoming environment would’ve been great, that with acknowledging that the need for respect and self-identification doesn’t die with age. This ‘it could happen to me’ impulse is natural, particularly since something quite similar actually happened to me back then, only I wasn’t mature or self-assured enough to take advantage of it. It seems today’s will not settle with not settle with writing teenagehood post-scripts 10 years in retrospect. That’s progress.

In Belated August Upset, Efron Wins Back SMA Title

Before you re-read David Plotz’ otherwise excellent case for abolishing August (it’s such a crappy month that even its SMA edition runs late!), consider the August edition of the Sexiest Males Alive list. Things have been fairly stable for months and months, and I didn’t expect August, of all months, to be the one to change that (heck, the SMA even was on an August hiatus last year!) But that was before these pictures of Zac Efron came before my eyes. Just when I thought the lovely Emile Hirsch had crushed all opposition once and for all, Zefron manages to regain pole position for the first time in ten months. It was somewhat surprising, since the premiere 17 Again earlier this summer failed to topple Hirsch. Maybe it was my purchase of the 17 Again DVD that made the difference. September’s arrival of Ang Lee’s Hirsch-induced Taking Woodstock has potential to put the heat back on, however (as if it was ever off).

But that’s not the only way in which August has been an eventful month on the SMA. We welcome two newcomers – Harry Potter’s Freddie Stroma and the lovely young Brit Dougie Poynter, and two old regulars that have had a brief stint out in the dark. And in a month rich on dramatic ups and downs, Corbin Bleu of the upcoming Beautiful Life surges a massive 19 spots to claim the Climber Of The Month title, while his former High School Musical 3 co-star Matt Prokop, shockingly, is awarded the dubious honors of having taken the steepest fall, a marked 18 spots, to #38.

Finally, we bid farewell to two of the most longstanding members of the SMA fellowship. Aaron Carter has been on a glide path to this conclusion for months, and something really happened when reruns of his obnoxious shtick on House of Carters actually started to worked against him. I’ve held conflicted feelings toward Chace Crawford from the beginning, certainly recognizing his beauty, but at the same time wondered if ultimately he’s just boring. Also, the rehabilitation of cast mate Westwick, another one of those who’ve had a bumpy ride on the SMA, may have played to Crawford’s disfavor. I wouldn’t count any of them permanently out, though.

The departure of Michael Pitt may pale in SMA-historic importance, but he’s off too.

As always, the changes on the list are usually caused by any particular guy being considered by me to be relatively more attractive than he was considered last month. That, however, of course doesn’t necessarily mean that any of the other people on this list have become markedly less attractive, only that they perhaps have not been as good at getting my attention lately. With that said, let’s break it down:

#1-10: It came down to this. My love for Emile Hirsch is practically limitless, but when Zac Efron hones his complements his beautiful face with a body this well-honed, he at least a month in the spotlight. I know he’s not a great actor, but that’s not what this list is about anyway. And sexy he is. I’ll let the pictures speak for themselves. Elsewhere in the top tier, the most interesting development may be Jesse McCartney’s mini-collapse. I’m not being consistent here, of course. Elsewhere on the list, a four-spot decline will be treated as just a minor adjustment. That I’m now no longer sure whether I prefer the surfer dude Jesse of his Summerland days or the black-haired guy of the Departure era, could be a cause for longer-term concern, however. I’m not saying I’m questioning his hotness, but as with the discussion of which Leonardo DiCaprio should be considered for the SMA, such deliberations could possibly weaken his standing.

Rising to the occasion are Logan Lerman and Zac Hanson, both securing personal bests. Lerman probably would have been up there regardless of the recent red-carpet shots for My One And Only, but they didn’t exactly hurt his chances, if you see what I mean. Zac Hanson’s continued momentum is more deeply founded. I’m not saying he’ll now be as firmly planted in the top ten as Hirsch or Efron, only that my Zac-scination doesn’t have to with his looks alone, though they’re certainly a big part of it. After ten years of passionate, but not always open fandom, there’s a certain sense of what could only be described as loyalty there, too. Luke Pasqualino, whose rose along with Lerman and Hanson in July, also keeps on climbing, to become the highest-placed Skins star. Rounding out the top tier is skater Ryan Sheckler. I feel like he would have been higher on this list, if he hadn’t decided to cover much of his amazing body with enormous tattoos. He is beautiful, but all that ink is a definitive turn-off.

#11-20: Last month, I predicted a drop-off for David Gallagher, due to syndicated 7th Heaven episodes coming to a temporary halt. Turns out the halt was very temporary, as he’s now back gracing Norwegian television screens as the conflicted Simon Camden. For reasons more closely related to tight competition than any real challenge to his overall cuteness, he still tumbles out of the top ten, for the first time in many, many months. There he’s challenged from below be a still upwardly mobile Kevin Zegers, generously taking advantage of his Transamerica exposure of early summer.

Three guys more pressed for exposure than Zegers though, Charlie Hunnam and Ed Speleers, also put in impressive performances, climbing five spots each, to #15 and #20, respectively. This generally is the dilemma for Hunnam, like it is for the aforementioned DiCaprio, among others. If this list was about physical attraction only, and if all contenders were awarded equal exposure, Hunnam would probably be a regular in the top ten. When he isn’t, despite my fond memories of the coming-of-age left me from Queer as Folk UK, it has to do with him not being nearly as beautiful today as we once was. I suppose Speleers is a better model than he’s an actor, but in the capacity of the former, he has a constant potential to crack the top twenty. We also take note of Ryan Donowho and Chris Lowell’s strong showings. Donowho seems to be one of those who will always bounce back when dealt a setback, and he should be awarded a major role soon. Fortunately, Private Practice has kept Lowell in the public, though I much prefer watching Veronica Mars reruns to get my fix. Finally, Raviv Ullman’s rise to #13 deserves a mention, too. As always, I can’t quite explain my attraction to this guy, but there has to be something there.

#21-30: I don’t really know how to explain this, but when I saw the promo pictures of the CW’s new drama Beautiful Life, I found Corbin Bleu, he of Zac-Efron’s-basketball-obsessed-best-friend-in-High School Musical-fame, could actually be quite hot. That was news to me. Cute? Sure. Hot? Meh. Until now. He has a great body, and a self-conciously cocky attitude that I found really attractive, catapulting him up 19 spots, to #25. Early on in the franchise, he stood for me as one of those fresh-faced youngsters who placed HSM movies firmly in the kids’ movies camp, but now times have changed. Also in positive, Taylor Hanson gains nine spots, sprinting into the twenties. I listen to Hanson regularly, but last week I decided to pop the Underneath Acoustic Live concert in the DVD, and it made me realize more than ever before what I beautiful and talented the Hanson frontman is. It’s six years since that show recorded, but I have to say has aged really well. Zac has always “my” put that doesn’t mean I haven’t also had an eye on Taylor.

For another one of my Early Gay Crushes, Jonathan Taylor Thomas, August was a rather uneventful month, but almost everyone saw gains; Joe Jonas followed Taylor Hanson’s lead and used his modest three spot gain to break into the third third, while Jamie Bell and Alex Pettyfer. to guys who should be familiar with unpredictable highs and lows by now, both got a lift. Most importantly, Pettyfer. the sometimes too-perfect Brit, rose to #22, practically reversing his slide last month. I’m not sure exactly triggered Bell’s gains, but I did catch a few minutes of Billy Elliot a couple of weeks ago, perhaps triggering memories of Bell’s hotness in movies like Mister Foe and Dear Wendy. The less-talented but equally beautiful Lucas Till saw a minor setback, but something says me we’ll see more of him. And there more I see him, the more I like what I see. Having said that, I might as well admit that I have watched this Taylor Swift video several, only to look at Lucas. Finally, I have to point to Dan Stevens’ very impressive #24 showing. Sure, that’s down seven spots from July, but this is a guy whose only noteworthy acting credit was in The Line of Beauty, and who will probably not get much exposure elsewhere. Keep this high under such conditions is nothing short of impressive.

#31-40: Now that the Harry Potter series is the most commercially successful movie franchise of all time, I’m not exactly surprised to see that it has also fostered yet another potential heartthrob. Freddie Stroma’s appearance in The Half-Blood Prince may not be big, and his character may not be among the most likable, but frankly my dear, I don’t give a damn. Stroma looks a little like a young Ryan Phillippe, and alongside Dan Radcliffe, he ensures that the movie has plenty of eye-candy. If the 36th placed newcomer doesn’t fall victim to the dreaded so-pretty-he’s-boring syndrome, he could be in it the for the long run. Potter rides (insert erotic broomstick metaphor) the movie momentum to #35, up six since last month. Like Lerman and Radcliffe, Joseph Gordon-Levitt too proves the benefits of having a new movie out. In the 500 Days of Summer trailer, JGL’s look is back to his super attractive Mysterious Skin days, and I’m not one to complain.

In other franchise-related news, we have the dramatic decline of Matt Prokop. As I believed I said last month, he was set to drop before I coincidentally rewatched HSM3, and thus this may have been in the waiting for some time. I’m having trouble explain exactly why he fell so low, however, but my feelings about him vary almost on a daily basis. He sure is cute, but in a almost boyish way, which sometimes creeps me out a little. Speaking of slides, both Leonardo DiCaprio (by twelve) and Jay Brannan (by nine) are down. When I don’t fear of either of them however, it has to do with two things. Regular readers should know by now that Leo’s performance on the SMA is filled with ups and downs. He surged on the back of Revolutionary Road, only to fall back the next month. Now the same seems to have happened with the DVD release of Total Eclipse. I see no reason why won’t bounce back when his next movie hits theaters. For Brannan, I have a sense that someone whose (sexy) voice is in my ears constantly will probably manage to hang on. The release of In Living Cover and the continued strength of Goddamned has practically made me addicted to him.

#41-50: The same month that it seems like serial returnees Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Daniel Radcliffe may have gotten their breakthrough, we also bid another welcome back to Ed Westwick. He was reintroduced briefly with his small role in Son of Rambow, but the fact that I can’t exactly explain why he has re-emerged this time may signal that he could be less vulnerable to the attention of the moment. Going in at #41 certainly is a promising sign. Equally positive is the arrival at #46 of McFly’s Dougie Poynter. Yes, I know it’s a little low, and I know he’s got some pretty awful tattoos, but he’s also got a face that reminds me of Jamie Bell. British gaymag Attitude is obsessed with his band, so I suppose I’ll get my regular fix. Stars aligning for this guy? 

Over on the negative, it’s that time of year again for Rafael Nadal. With U.S. Open underway, his five spot slip could well be reversed by October. It will take some real effort from Cristiano Ronaldo if he’s to avoid taking the route of Aaron Carter and Chace Crawford, but I would definitely be sorry if he fell off. Part of the problem is that now that he resides in Spain, my ball-watching (pun unintended) eyes won’t be on him constantly. That said, it’s not like that helped him much in his months at Manchester United either.

As blockbuster summer turns to Oscar-baiting, it looks like time’s running out on Star Trek’s Chris Pine. I wouldn’t count him out definitively, but a fourteen-spot slide is brutal. At the moment, his best hope may be to become one of the steadfast 40′ers; those guys counted out many times already who always live to fight another month. Rhys Wakefield’s rise to #44 is one of the sunshine stories, and Brady Corbet should also be counted in this category. With the exit of Michael Pitt the argument sounds a little less convincing however. After a good few months in late spring, Mitch Firth may now be joining the club, having seen the same merciless slide as Ronaldo in recent months. But, as I have said numerous times before; with him, as with people like Chris Egan, Zac Hanson and Leonardo DiCaprio I feel some sort of loyalty. I fully expect him to be back in October.

1. Zac Efron (Previous ranking: 3)
2. Emile Hirsch (1)
3. Hunter Parrish (4)
4. Logan Lerman (6)
5. Zac Hanson (8)
6. Jesse McCartney (2)
7. Luke Pasqualino (9)
8. Nick Hoult (7)
9. Mitch Hewer (10)
10. Ryan Sheckler (11)
11. David Gallagher (4)
12. Kevin Zegers (14)
13. Raviv Ullman (15)
14. Tyler Hoechlin (12)
15. Charlie Hunnam (20)
16. Chris Egan (13)
17. Ryan Donowho (23)
18. Gaspard Ulliel (18)
19. Chris Lowell (24)
20. Ed Speleers (25)
21. Lucas Till (16)
22. Alex Pettyfer (27)
23. Jamie Bell (26)
24. Dan Stevens (17)
25. Corbin Bleu (44)
26. Taylor Hanson (35)
27. William Moseley (22)
28. Jonathan Taylor Thomas (29)
29. Joe Jonas (32)
30. Jesse Eisenberg (28)
31. Adam Brody (31)
32. Sean Faris (34)
33. Leonardo DiCaprio (21)
34. Joseph Gordon-Levitt (39)
35. Daniel Radcliffe (41)
36. Shad Moss (33)
37. Freddie Stroma (new)
38. Matt Prokop (19)
39. Jay Brannan (30)
40. Fernando Torres (38)
41. Ed Westwick (RE)
42. Rafael Nadal (37)
43. Mitch Firth (42)
44. Rhys Wakefield (47)
45. Cristiano Ronaldo (40)
46. Dougie Poynter (new)
47. Ryan Phillippe
48. Brady Corbet (46)
49. Cody Linley (49)
50. Chris Pine (36)

The Case For Caring About Famous Dead People

The response to the recent news about the death of John Hughes, director of seminal teen comedy works like Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and The Breakfast Club, was interesting in a number of ways. Not only because his death gave me a reason to rewatch some of the best comedies of my lifetime, but also because the sudden outpourings of nostalgia had me thinking about the nature of admiring and identifying with famous people.

When Michael Jackson died back in June, I felt something similar to the slight sadness with which I received news of Hughes’ passing. Still, my personal relationship with Jackson’s cultural legacy was greater than it was with Hughes. Before they turned to the crime mystery genre, many of the Jackson obituaries in some ways resembled my own: They purported to be about the man himself, but without even wanting to, many of them ended up as some sort of testimony to the impact Jackson’s music and myth had on a generation of pop music lovers. In addition to being a source for personal therapy, they offered a way to investigate his impact on a culture at large.

It is this, watching how people of different generations and backgrounds find support and comfort in common experiences at different times, that makes our obsession with dead celebrities so fascinating. I may have been introduced to Michael Jackson through Dangerous not Thriller, and my first experience with John Hughes may have been Home Alone and not The Breakfast Club, but regardless of the fact that I’m too young to remember their prime, the written eulogies stirred me. Not only because many of them were thoughtful, appreciative, poignant and beautifully written, but also because I had, many years later, and long since removed from the cultural moment that canonized them, some of the same experiences.

Even though I was born the same year The Breakfast Club was released, its anti-authoritarian spirit, surprising warmth, wit and eye for effective and essentially cinematic storytelling, still spoke to me when I saw it for the first time two years ago. And I’m pretty sure this had little to do with the consensus in declaring it a modern classic. Despite all the later attempts to create something similar, the source of what had later become tired cliches nonetheless still feels funny and fresh. That basic fact, paired with a sense of how its gallery of teen comedy types prepared the way and made recognizable and acceptable the characters of more recent teen comedies classics like Dazed and Confused and Clueless, meant that the Hughes obits felt just as relevant to me as they would have to anyone who matured with Hughes’ short span of precise and angsty teencoms during the eighties. Thus, I’m inclined to agree with Dana Stevens of Slate, comparing Hughes’ cultural impact on that decade with that of Marlon Brando in the fifties, at the same time that I understand and appreciate the long-held skepticism of New York Magazine’s David Edelstein. Sixteen Candles was never a part of my growing up, but Dawson’s Creek was. I’m pretty sure Kevin Williamson’s TV show would have looked pretty different if it hadn’t been for Hughes. He simply offered a lens through which the social strata of teenagehood could be interpreted, and hopefully transcended.

Michael Jackson and John Hughes are only two examples of how the immediate framing of the legacy of influential personalities interest me, however. I don’t even have to have any personal experience with his or her work. The death of the author David Foster Wallace is a case in point. Before he died, I had only the vaguest sense of how central he had been to the debate about the concept of the Great American Novel over the last nearly twenty years, and I didn’t know Infinite Jest other than by name (no, I still haven’t read it, if that’s what you’re wondering). But some of the articles praising his work, like this one by Laura Miller in Salon, made me really interested in him both as an author, a “reporter”, a mythical figure (the brilliant but disturbed young literary genius) and a symptom (what it says about a culture to obsess so much about the romantic idea of the classic literary novel). In a perhaps bitter irony, it is great pieces like Miller’s who contribute to the fact that I probably read more books and articles about the possibilities and primacy of literary fiction than I read actual literary fiction itself. Laura Miller gave me an opportunity to share in the sense of loss and common experience, even though I had actually never read anything he wrote.

To me, expressing what Michael Jackson meant to you through personal anecdotes is not self-centered, and being moved by the death of David Foster Wallace is not conformism. It has little or nothing to do with a celebrity-crazed culture as such, and it doesn’t mean that we project our deepest feelings onto famous people because we don’t have any close friends or because we are unable to express them in other ways. Because our own experiences take the feelings from the abstract to the concrete, on the contrary, we are able to express ourselves individually within the context of a shared experience.

Or, as in the case of Laura Miller’s David Foster Wallace obit, it could be that the words are just that powerful. That’s a beautiful thought, don’t you think?

‘The Line of Beauty’, Or The Elephant In The Ballroom

Amid all the lies, wars, corruption, authoritarianism and disingenuous privatization schemes, it’s easy to forget  the things Tony Blair’s New Labour actually got right. In addition to several policy initiatives aimed at improving the state of public health care and education, Labour first and foremost deserves credit for its commitment to social liberalism. The Blair government finally abolished the disgraceful Section 28 law threatening teachers with losing their jobs if they taught about or adviced on homosexuality in school, and the former prime minister himself also was an unrelenting ambassador of modernity and tolerance when it came to LGBT issues. Blair may have been the savior that wasn’t in 1990’s social democracy, but in many ways, Britain still needed him.

I’m reminded of this when watching The Line of Beauty, the television adaptation of Alan Hollinghurst’s Booker Prize winning 2004 novel. The book has been standing on my bookshelf for years already, and it’s an almost perfect example of why I don’t quite know why I don’t read more fiction over non-fiction (maybe I’m just a simple wonk). It has the juiciness of a social satire, a sense of suspense and something at stake from its underlying AIDS storyline, and best of all, a political angle, portraying the young, self-important yuppies who thrived in Margaret Thatcher’s 1980’s Britain, as least so long as they made sure not to set themselves apart from the mainstream in any provocative way. I still can’t quite explain why I never got further than fifty pages into the book.

Going straight to the movie version instead of working my way through the book may technically make me something of a free-rider, but as we know from experience it’s not always a bad thing to come to a movie without a fixed set of images and expectations. In a somewhat strained parallel, one could even say that my approach to this movie resembles that of Nick Guest’s (played by Dan Stevens) relationship with the Feddens, the upper-class political family of his friend, with whom he is invited to stay; their status may be a short cut to power and money, but it’s not until he takes the time to really get to know them, that their inner contradictions and demons come out. His gay identity may not be something Nick’ necessarily wants to deny, but in the end, it’s his most important personality trait in the eyes of his host family. Translated back to the relationship between a book and a movie, it will always be hard for a movie (even one three hours long) to encapsulate all the intricacies of a novel, and some may write it off simply for the effort, but I nevertheless thoroughly enjoyed it.

One of the things that makes The Line of Beauty so interesting, is that it dares to go beyond it satirical look on Thatcherite Britain. Sure, the obnoxious arrogance that comes with wealth, power and politics still may be good for a few laughs, but pummeling Thatcherism’s relentless individualism is hardly ground-breaking by now. What really hooked me was how it dared to show the consequences of the politically expedient hypocrisy needed to preserve the Fedden’s family political clout, and the Conservative Party’s hold on power. To me, The Line of Beauty is at its core about the danger in accepting tolerance as something that gay people should necessarily strive for. Sure, from a pragmatic point of view  tolerance is vastly preferable to downright intolerance or hostility, but it should never be allowed to become the best imaginable position.

My point is that tolerance is nothing more than a poor man’s respect, that leaves all the power to the one showing the tolerance. To tolerate someone does not mean that you accept him as your equal, only that you in your high-mindedness decide to refrain from condemning someone. Also, because tolerance of gays does not require any deeply held conviction that another person’s lifestyle can be just as moral or immoral as your own, it can be withdrawn in an instant, to the detriment of the person being tolerated, but with little or no cost to the person being tolerant. Thus, the concept of tolerance is based upon a very uneven balance of power, and a view of humanity shallow enough to be truly condescending. Therefore, it is a great power tool, because it holds great potential for humiliation, if and when the tolerance is somehow withdrawn. This of course does not mean that I think or demand that people who have come to tolerate gays have to evolve into respect overnight, but I would certainly hope that they don’t believe that their passive tolerance means that that have done all they can.

Which brings me back to The Line of Beauty. The Fedden family only tolerate Nick’s homosexuality as long as it is kept a secret to anyone outside the family, and because it is always dealt with as part of a political calculation with regard to patriarch Gerald’s career as an MP, they never care enough about Nick to ever consider it as a natural part of his identity. By making it something not to be spoken about except for in terms of risk, they also effectively reduce him to his sexuality only, although they pretend it’s not an issue. This has much to do with the aforementioned political climate, in which gayness was condemned in part simply because conservatives (and many liberals and social democrats too, I might add) considered it a perversion, but also because of the mostly repressed issue of HIV/AIDS. Sex scandals may have caused a bit of a stir, but as Nick is poised to find out, there’s a difference between a sex scandal and a sex scandal. If it has anything to do with homosexuality, it doesn’t even to have involve actual sex to be considered scandalous.

This dynamic is the reason why Nick’s looming downfall is so painful to watch. In the end, it turns out, Nick is every bit as much a product of his time as are the Feddens. His mounting self-confidence and his failure (or perhaps refusal) to not pursue his hunger for all things beautiful, be they props or people, ultimately seal his fate. This sense of entitlement could be said to symbolize that very era of radical individualism, and paradoxical disdain for traditional obedience to the greater good. He quickly realizes that as long as he plays the role expected of him – or at least is discrete in veering from the script – he can be an asset to the Fedden family. His charm, eloquence, dazzling beauty and presumed heterosexuality makes him someone the Feddens like to show off as a family friend, which givess him a little bit of leeway, further enhanced by the fact that he is the only person knowing that the MP is having an affair. But he fails to take into account that the Feddens know something about him that could be even more damaging, and that they are in a better position to use it. Being unfaithful to your wife may be bad, but it’s not worse than being a queer.

Within this broader story of class, money, status and hypocrisy however, lies several great subplots. One if Nick’s instant chemistry with Catherine, the Fedden family’s chronically depressed daughter. Disdainful of the family’s political ambitions and something of an outcast herself, she identifies with Nick, because he’s one of very few people in her life that does not first and foremost treat her as suicidal. While she is treated with concern and affection in private settings, like Nick she’s often treated with slight condescension in public, since her depressive tendencies make her a possible ‘embarrassment’ to her family. The cynicism of the family’s political ambitions in the end alienates Cat to such an extent that Nick becomes something of an involuntary middleman between Cat and her family, itself playing a role in Nick’s ultimate confrontation with Gerald Fedden.

The Line of Beauty is funny as a satire, and a fascination investigation of how the struggle for power and status invariably fraught with hypocrisy. However, even though it is set in the Thatcherite 1980’s, I can’t help but think about today’s Conservative Party, under the leadership of self-proclaimed modernizer David Cameron. One of his efforts to paint Tories as modern is his outreach to gay people. This guy looks poised to become Britain’s next prime minister after the next general election, and it should be very interesting to see whether Cameron opts for tolerance, or if the Tories are indeed ready to take the leap into genuine acceptance. The Line of Beauty makes it easier to see the difference.

After Three Years Of Gayness, A Re-Post

With some minor tweaks, and in honor of my now three-year gayniversary; a re-post of my 2008 coming-out piece Two Years Ago Today Since I Came Out.

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August 7 is the one day of the year when I allow myself to be absolutely, unabashedly, one-hundred percent gay. I don’t know much about personal courage, living in a liberal country with my liberal friends and liberal family, but I can’t help but feel a little bit of pride when I think back at the day when I finally took the leap, and told others about my true identity. That’s also why I so deeply admire all the young people growing up knowing, or simply fearing, that their being gay will cause them pain and exclusion, and then do go ahead and do it anyway – because they want to be true to themselves. These things take character.

But then again: Will you ever meet someone as critical and skeptical of you as you are of yourself? For me, the hardest part of the whole coming out process was to convince myself that this was the real deal, that my attraction and emotional bond to guys was not going to go away. I  was never a self-hating gay, I simply had trouble coming around to the fact that I was not quite like anybody else I knew. I had my first serious crush on a guy (a classmate of mine) back when I was thirteen, and another one when I was fifteen, and I guess I had briefly asked myself the supposedly terrifying question ‘You’re not gay, are you?’ (notice the somewhat defensive phrasing), but as those crushes faded, I simply went back to being the presumed heterosexual. Strangely, I never considered the fact that I never had any female crushes as an indication of gayness.

Anyway, it was not until I moved away from home back in 2004 to go to university, that I started rethinking who I really was. Even though I love both my older sister and my twin brother, and they both had been very supportive of me at all times, I found it liberating to get a chance to redefine myself to other people, without having them comment on every minor change in my personality or appearance. When I think back on the period between fall 2004 and Christmas 2005, I’m always struck by how obvious it seems to me now that I was slowly adopting a gay identity, and how I still didn’t see it myself. Sure, I found a little bit of myself in such different pop-cultural works as Gregg Araki’s heartbreakingly earnest and beautiful gay-themed Mysterious Skin and encores of Dawson’s Creek, but still I couldn’t (or didn’t want to?) collect the dots emotionally, so to speak.

It might seem odd, then, but what eventually made me realize I was gay, was that my twin brother came out to me in late November 2005. We’ve always been close, and of course I was both happy for him, and proud of him for acting on his realization. We gave each other a big hug, and I told him how happy I was for him. This was not my full reaction, however. I’m a little ashamed to admit this, but when he had left that night, I also battled a strange sense of envy. It wasn’t that I wasn’t truly happy he had finally concluded he could be open about his orientation; I was. Instead, I battled the conflicted feeling that he had somehow beaten me to it. At the time, I wasn’t ready to admit, neither publicly nor to myself that I was gay, but I assumed (wrongly, as it turned out) that the fact that he was now openly gay, could make it harder for me to conclude with regard to my own sexuality.

In retrospect, this of course seems like a really silly concern, but it was real enough back then. Gays pondering their identity ask all kinds of questions, not all founded in reality. Thus, one of my prime concerns, as I became more and more convinced throughout the spring and early summer of 2006 that I was in fact gay, was whether people I loved and trusted would consider me a ‘copycat’ if I came out so soon after my brother. They didn’t, of course, and had I not been so self-absorbed at the time, I would have realized the entire assumption was just silly.

When I retell the events of my self-realization to other people, I tend to say that I realized I was gay almost overnight. From what I’ve written so far, that of course is an exaggeration. But even though I might comprise what happened for dramatic effect, it’s not entirely false. It is in fact true that I decided to come out the very same day I told myself in a ‘it’s-not-just-a-phase, there-is-no-way-I’m-gonna-change-the-way-I-feel, this-is-the-point-of-no-return’ kind of way that I was gay. You can believe me or not, but as I woke up on Saturday August 5, 2006, from a night of conflicting feelings, and days of going around weighing the pros and cons, rejecting the last lifeline (‘Might I at least be bisexual?’, ‘What about that nice girl back in kindergarten?’ etc), I decided I couldn’t take it any longer.

And then I chickened out. Just like my brother had done the year before, I decided I wanted my father to be the first to know. Picking up the phone to call him probably is one of the hardest things I’ve done in my life, and that excruciating insecurity lingers, even though eventually I couldn’t get myself to tell him. I wanted to tell him in person, but I didn’t have the guts to arrange for us to meet. When I dropped the idea, and instead started talking soccer with him (a common passion), I was truly ashamed of myself for being weak, but also for not ending my state of emotional limbo.

As I often do when I’m frustrated or insecure in any way, I turned to writing to try to gather my thoughts and feelings. For therapy, I sat down and wrote a long essay, much like this one, to get down on paper what I felt about being gay and what should happened next. I went to the subject from every angle; writing about gay role models, the public attitude toward gays, and how I thought I would fit with gay sterotypes; early clues in childhood memories, my high school crushes, feelings about gay porn, and finally, what you could call a ‘roll-out strategy’ for how to come out to friends and family, how to tell them, when and in what order. This might sound silly (and it probably is, too), but as I wrote I had this one lyric from the deliciously catchy Savage Garden song Affirmation constantly churning in my head: ‘I believe you can’t control or choose your sexuality’. It became sort of a mantra  for me in the coming days.

My plan to first tell my dad, then my brother, followed by my sister and my two male best friends, was very close to getting scrapped when my sister dropped by that same evening. My head felt like it was going to explode, but again I couldn’t find the right way to say it. I knew she would be perfectly fine with it, but I forced myself to stick to the plan, though not before I had tried for several hours to make smooth segway into the topic of gayness. Even though in my many ways it was a painful evening, I learned one thing: In coming out to people, I had to be straightforward. Looking for ways to let the conversation just naturally turn to my own feelings, would only offer me excuses to back out. When I finally told her, a week later, after I had come out to my dad and my brother, I just straightened up and told her. She had in fact said for years that she thought I was gay (which, come to think of it, might have weirdly contributed to my insecurity), so she wasn’t exactly surprised. When I said ‘I have to tell you something. I think you might have heard it once before’, referring to my brother’s coming out, she simply broke me off, asking: ‘Is this more of the same?’, and started laughing. The laughter made me feel a little small, but she soon hugged me and told me she was cool with it. I loved her for it.

Anyway, dear reader, if you’re still with me, I’d like to return to the chronological order of events. By Monday August 7, I was back where it had all started two days earlier. Phone in hand, I was ready to call my dad to set up a meeting. I actually went though with it this time, but in a way, to say ‘I need to see you. There’s something I need to tell you’ was just as hard as breaking the actual news to him. I guess it had something to do with the fact that once I’d set up the meeting, there would be no way back. I had already made him understand I had something important to tell him, and if I tried to talk myself out of it, he would ask questions until he’d uncovered what I wanted to tell him. When he finally showed up, at 3.45 p.m., I was so nervous I thought I was going to die.

When I wrote earlier that I had to go straight to what I wanted to say, that too was a slight exaggeration. I hadn’t done this before, and I tried to buy time by making small talk about sports or the weather, or whatever. But that works for only so long, so at about 4.05 (I remember the time fairly exactly because I was watching my cellphone nervously every other minute), I said something along the lines of ‘There is, however, a specific reason why I wanted you to come. Over the last couple of days I’ve been doing some thinking. I think you might have heard this before, but here goes. I’ve found out that I’m gay, too.’ Even though I fought it vigorously, I had a smile on my lips when I uttered the word ‘gay’. I guess it was a sense of pride.

Then my dad smiled and said ‘Would it be appropriate to say congratulations?’. I nodded, and immediately I knew that all my paranoid questions had been more of a way for me to get my life in order, than founded in reality. He went to say all the things you want your dad to say in situations like these: ‘I’m glad you told me’; ‘Do you need any help breaking the news to friends or relatives’, ‘You have to do this in the way that you’re most comfortable with’ etc. In fact, he even asked me the ‘When did you know’ question, correctly sensing that I needed to talk to someone about this. I think I was even prouder of him than he was of me.

Coming out of course is a continuing process, and I’ve gotten progressively better at it. But on this very day two days ago, I didn’t have the capacity to imagine it would ever get any easier. That, among other things, is why today I once again embrace that old Savage Garden mantra: ‘I believe you can’t control or choose your sexuality’. I chose to live with it.

All The Right Reasons Why I Love The Jayhawks

There’s always something challenging when your favorite band decides to put together a best-of compilation. You are guaranteed to disagree with some of the song choices, and there is also the little detail that best-of albums by default point to a glorious past, but not necessarily an equally glorious future. For many, if not most bands, releasing what’s basically a career summary would seem like an implicit acknowledgement that your best years are behind you. Sure, it’s a nice service to people who may have just discovered you, but to your longtime fans, it may illicit one of two responses: Either the arrogant shrug, meaning that the compilation is written off as something unworthy of real, loyal fans, because they of course already own, know and love all your records and look with some suspicion at anyone who might need a best-of-compilation as an introduction. Or they engage with it with some emotional distance, as something less than an original album, but still worthy of academic interest, if only to discuss how the got the song selection went so spectacularly wrong.

Of course, July’s release of Music From The North Country, an anthology of highlights from the career of country-rockers The Jayhawks, would not fall neatly into this category, as the band parted ways four years ago. But that doesn’t mean that I didn’t feel the exact combination of the two reactions. Actually, almost to a greater degree. In addition to making me consider what exactly it is that I love about them, I was struck by a renewed sense of sadness.  Music From The North Country is a monument of great accomplishments and impeccable taste, but it is also clear signal that The Jayhawks as we knew it is now in the past. Lead singers Mark Olson and Gary Louris may be touring , and even recording together again, but judging from last year’s disappointing Ready For The Flood, the sum of the both of them still is not as great as it once was under the Jayhawks label. That said, I’m of course thrilled with recent reports that Jayhawks are now hopefully on the slow path to recording again, doing a couple of reunion shows this summer.

That said, treating the Olson/Louris partnership as part of one, evolving Jayhawks timeline would be a misrepresentation. Olson was the frontman until 1995’s Tomorrow The Green Grass failed to hand them a commercial breakthrough, and from there, Louris took the group from its fairly distinct alt-country background into experiments with noise on the somewhat confused and uneven Sound of Lies (1997), and finally to the comfortably beautiful country-infused pop music of Smile (2000) and Rainy Day Music (2003). In what could only considered an enormous accomplishment by Louris, the transition of Jayhawks from an Olson to a Louris project, and from an alt-country stable to a country-conscious pop group, they never lost the ability to craft some incredibly catchy songs. Even the Sound of Lies had definitive highlights like Trouble and The Man Who Loved Life, both wisely included on Music From The North Country.

I assume it’s out of respect for Jayhawks’ diverse but still surprisingly coherent musical signature, that they have decided to include roughly the same amount of songs from all albums. The debut album Blue Earth, which would have to be considered very good if released by almost any other group, but has the slight feel of minor Jayhawks, is also represented by Two Angels, which was also included on their first big-label release, 1992’s Hollywood Town Hall, and Ain’t No End. While I’m sure I could put together another full disc of songs to replace the ones picked, summarizing The Jayhawks’  career, while certainly a treat to the listener, will always consist of a series of hard choices. There’s no law saying that Clouds, Martin’s Song and Waiting For The Sun are necessarily better or more natural choices from HTH than Take Me With You (When You Go), Nevada, California or Crowded In The Wings, but the songs chosen only make me hope even stronger that those who hear The Jayhawks for the first time through this collection will go on to check out their entire output.

Likewise, the determination to not discriminate against against any one record and keeping the best-of portion to one disc, meant that Tomorrow The Green Grass had to be capped at four songs. Again, Blue, I’d Run Away, Miss Williams’ Guitar and Over My Shoulder are all excellent songs, and I would have been in pain to cut any of them, but still, the upper limit means that personal favorites like Two Hearts, Bad Time, See Him On The Street and (particularly) Nothing Left To Borrow will have to be left out. Apart from Uncle Tupelo’s No Depression (1990) and possible some Wilco records, Tomorrow has to be the best and most influential album of the 1990’s alt-country scene, and to that background, it’s a little sad to see its excellence curbed in this way. As perhaps the one record that really moved me to the (alt-)country camp (later opening my ears and mind to such diverse acts as Ryan Adams, Emmylou Harris, Loretta Lynn, Dolly Parton, Bright Eyes, Son Volt, Jesse Malin, Golden Smog,  and even – in a wider sense – to The Hold Steady,  Steve Earle and late Neill Diamond), it also has taken on a special status in my record collection.

If you ask me which of the Gary Louris-headlined Jayhawks albums is my favorite, I’ll probably give you a different answer every day of the week, and the songs collected here, for instance, only begin to explore the depths of pitch-perfect pop music that graced Smile. I’m very satisfied that the title track was included, and I’m Gonna Make You Love Me has to be one of the best songs in the entire Jayhawks catalog. Still, I think I would have replaced the (admittedly beautiful) What Led Me To This Town with Somewhere In Ohio (this one, and Bruce Springsteen’s Youngstown was enough to make Ohio one of my favorite states). And even this wouldn’t have left for the incredible harmonies of A Break In The Clouds, or Broken Harpoon, another one of those who despite having taken on a very special personal meaning to me, I’m sure would receive equal love from anyone. The experiments of Sound of Lies are still traceable on Smile, and if I am to point to a weakness on this generally excellent album, it will have to be Life Floats By and Pretty Thing, and their forays into more straightforward rock. Which is my way of saying they are the only tracks I would have excluded from an extended version of Music From The North Country.

Finally, there’s Rainy Day Music, continually fighting it out with Smile for the title of Gary Louris Jayhawks masterpiece. Music From The Country picks Tailspin, Save It For A Rainy Day, Angelyne and All The Right Reasons, and they are all welcome inclusions. If pressured however, I may have dropped Tailspin for Stumbling Through The Dark, and then probably have cried myself to sleep over my inability to secure a slot for The Eyes of Sarah Jane, You Look So Young or One Man’s Problem. On the final tracks of the album, Jayhawks’ seems to reach back to the rootsy feel of the transitory Sound of Lies, as if to try to knit all of Jayhawks’ history together. It is oh so fitting that the final track on The Jayhawks final album is titled Will I See You In Heaven. It’s not only as if they know this is the end, it’s also a pretty precise description of how their music makes me feel. Nostalgic, sure, and pretty sure there is a heaven on earth, but most importantly, this song makes me believe that at one point in the future, we will be reunited.

Until that happens, check out Music From The North Country. And make it only your starting point, will you?