A very disturbing story, intentionally disguised as something beautiful. I had no idea how dark a film Saturday Night Fever really was until showing it to Dane last weekend. The movie is a very disturbing story that, like When People Go Away, is intentionally disguised as something beautiful: the drab, colorless world of Catholicism set against the brilliance of shimmering disco lights. The plot is ugly. The film is a masterpiece of visual metaphor. Every single shot is *perfect,* with each and every visible item placed there for a specific reason. I was a kid in 1977, and Mother forbid R-rated films, so I didn't see it in theaters. I do recall how popular it was, a generation-defining period-piece, one of several blockbusters that year: Star Wars, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and the lesser-known Looking for Mister Goodbar (where a young Richard Gere does pushups in a jockstrap - WOOF!). The movie perfectly captures the bondage of the Catholic family unit, the deeply-entrenched guilt & shame that's inflicted on a child in from infancy, like Pyongyang-propaganda, or cradle-to-grave Liberal entitlements. The picture was filmed before our current political correctness, so the dialogue is often *shocking* by today's standards, the racial slurs in particular. But that's how people really talked in those days, especially within inner-city New York. The ethnic neighborhoods were just as culturally segregated as when Caleb Carr described them in his novel The Alienist. Their world was harsh, repetitive, repressive, and unaccepting of ideas that rocked the status-quo. Their circumstances offered little chance of hope. While Vinnie Barbarino was struttin' to The Fifth of Beethoven, on the other side of the river, Capote was doing lines with Halston at Studio 54. And while that was happening, Carter, though well-meaning, wasted network prime-time to tell all of us to tighten our belts like a straightjacket. Considering that Cadillac had to hack off the asses of its just-in-time-for-the-gas-crisis 77' Coupe DeVilles, it's no wonder that Reagan won in a landslide.
It was fun to discuss the film with Dane as the two of us watched together. Dane's a closet-philosopher, so we focused on Fever's *exquisite* use of symbolism, as the 2001 Odyssey's cloistered oasis of happiness played out against Bobby C literally CRYING for Tony's help. *Annette waiting outside the dancing studio for Tony w/condoms. *Robert Costanzo's hourly hardware store employees with 20 years tenure. *Tony Marino's iconic white suit, paired with an ugly facial scar, covered by a cheap bandage. *The hideous way that women were treated, and the fact it was expected. *Rape. *Abortion. *Intolerance. *...Lonliness. The nuances are magnificent. As a man who experiences the world through visual metaphor, the film's use of light was genuinely emotional to me, as The Bee Gees sang in harmony, against violent yellows, searing reds, and Electric Light Orchestra oranges. Gulp. The last time I'd seen the film, I thought Stephanie was "showing off" by talking about art, music, and Laurence Olivier - but I'd been totally wrong. Steph was actually trying to help Tony, trying to show him an escape, quietly attempting to escape her own fear by endeavoring to connect with someone who was exactly like...herself. (Standing to CLAP.) And then when you layer Tony's family dynamic, Jesus Christ! Watching Tony shout F-bombs in his Father's face (while his Mother prayed across the table) almost gave me, not chills, but h i v e s. I remember those conversations. My parents fighting across the kitchen table, while I fought back tears and my sister suffered in silence. Catholic guilt is disgusting. It took me 53 years to shed my own, and begin the life I've always wanted. The film, like When People Go Away, cuts to the soul by showing the tragedy of "lost potential," and, as we enter the Age of Aquarius, *lost potential* is the first issue we must address.
It was fun to discuss the film with Dane as the two of us watched together. Dane's a closet-philosopher, so we focused on Fever's *exquisite* use of symbolism, as the 2001 Odyssey's cloistered oasis of happiness played out against Bobby C literally CRYING for Tony's help. *Annette waiting outside the dancing studio for Tony w/condoms. *Robert Costanzo's hourly hardware store employees with 20 years tenure. *Tony Marino's iconic white suit, paired with an ugly facial scar, covered by a cheap bandage. *The hideous way that women were treated, and the fact it was expected. *Rape. *Abortion. *Intolerance. *...Lonliness. The nuances are magnificent. As a man who experiences the world through visual metaphor, the film's use of light was genuinely emotional to me, as The Bee Gees sang in harmony, against violent yellows, searing reds, and Electric Light Orchestra oranges. Gulp. The last time I'd seen the film, I thought Stephanie was "showing off" by talking about art, music, and Laurence Olivier - but I'd been totally wrong. Steph was actually trying to help Tony, trying to show him an escape, quietly attempting to escape her own fear by endeavoring to connect with someone who was exactly like...herself. (Standing to CLAP.) And then when you layer Tony's family dynamic, Jesus Christ! Watching Tony shout F-bombs in his Father's face (while his Mother prayed across the table) almost gave me, not chills, but h i v e s. I remember those conversations. My parents fighting across the kitchen table, while I fought back tears and my sister suffered in silence. Catholic guilt is disgusting. It took me 53 years to shed my own, and begin the life I've always wanted. The film, like When People Go Away, cuts to the soul by showing the tragedy of "lost potential," and, as we enter the Age of Aquarius, *lost potential* is the first issue we must address.
Chuckling. Tony hits all my checkmarks: young, thin, black leather jacket, high-heeled boots...It's eerie how much Saturday Night Fever mirrors what's happening in society, today. In addition to my usual raunch, I've also been sharing my experiences querying agents, and promoting my debut of a new Fiction Genre - and a totally new way of telling a story. I know many of those who follow this blog locally do so to see who's-dick-was-in-who's-ass in Touche's clubroom (Chuckling - and to see if I give them a shout-out them when describing Touche), but for those of you who actually read novels for intellectual pleasure, you know how BIG the invention of a new Genre is. (HINT: It's Fucking Staggering!!!) I'm mentioning this because it pairs nicely with Fever's theme of brazen intolerance, because even as a gay man with a crippling disability, I've found myself intentionally ostracised by people I once thought were my friends. Years ago - in the 17 years when I was a Barnes & Noble ASM - I was a top contributor to the unauthorized Facebook forum for B&N Booksellers. My posts were much like these blogs, shorter of course, as funny as my Twitter/X & Facebook feeds, and without all the mentions of clubroom debauchery. I recently rejoined the forum, and crafted a formal announcement of my literary accomplishment. As the group has over 10k members, I test-drove the post in a much smaller LGBTQ BN Bookseller group, to see how the formatting would look in public, and I was able to tweak the sentence placement, before posting it where it mattered. That's actually how When People Go Away got started a year ago, as a post in numerous BDSM-themed rooms, with "Where are you, boy?" - the very first entry in Sir Dave's Blog. All of those posts generated comments & likes, but the post that delivered almost 200 friend requests was the one that launched the book.
As I rapidly expand my social media presence (I'm joining Trump's "Truth Social" this week btw; I want to sent WPGA to Styxhexenhammer666), I've been testing the waters in new places. But the unofficial BN group is the "big one," as it contains ten-thousand people who will know exactly how groundbreaking what I've done really is. Within the literary world, creating a new Genre is as big a cure for cancer. Add a new narrative style on top of that, and you've cured the common cold - as well as solved the Middle East crisis, taken Kim's nukes away, and finally gotten the White House to admit that the cocaine found in Hunter's skivvies was meant for Biden's morning *Ensure,* in hopes he might stay awake for his next public appearance. But in just a six-hour period, not only was my post removed from the tiny forum, I'd learned I'd been permanently banned from the national Bookseller page. I stared at my computer with my mouth on the floor. A few minutes passed before the youngest of my alters - the most damaged one of all - tearfully asked:
"What just happened, Sir?"
Truth be told, this really wasn't a surprise. The Barnes and Noble Unauthorized Bookseller Breakroom Facebook page is known for its unabashedly-intolerant Moderators. They claim not to be biased of course, but what they mean by "unbiased" is the same unbias as CNN allowing Nancy Pelosi a solid 90 seconds (in a 3-minute prime time segment) to seethingly fat-shame Donald Trump on Cooper's show, a few years back. I actually got in trouble on the BN page, on the day following Trump's 2016 election. When I'd visited the forum that morning, I found it filled with scathing anti-Trump posts, clearly violating the room's rules on political debate. The posts were heinous. One Trans Woman even had the audacity to change her profile photo to all-black, because of the horror, the horror, the horror, of now having to live under a Republican administration, as Trump was no doubt going to stop gay marriage, lock all us leathermen into our basement dungeons, and hold down all the tranny's to sew their penises back on (which would be impossible of course, because their old dicks would be medical waste). I watched the room for hours. It was an anti-Trump free-for-all. About 1pm, I'd finally had enough, and wrote a very tender post trying to calm everyone down. But my post was removed immediately, and one of the MODs actually BLOCKED me, personally. I was literally the lone voice of reason, yet even as a gay man with a crippling cognitive disability, I was (ahem) "spanked." I encourage you to read the blogs I posted during this period (they're in "Dave's Blog Archive" in my toolbar above), as I make the case proving the Democrat's hypocrisy - and how dangerous that really is for us in the LGBTQ community. I mean, yeah, sure, of course it's nice when your party's in power, but as history has proven, the pendulum will swing back. And when you suddenly find yourself on the other side of a coordinated media attack, you'll find yourself in h i v e s, and holding a knife to your wrists because intolerance brought you to suicide, as it recently did to me a few months back ...
As I rapidly expand my social media presence (I'm joining Trump's "Truth Social" this week btw; I want to sent WPGA to Styxhexenhammer666), I've been testing the waters in new places. But the unofficial BN group is the "big one," as it contains ten-thousand people who will know exactly how groundbreaking what I've done really is. Within the literary world, creating a new Genre is as big a cure for cancer. Add a new narrative style on top of that, and you've cured the common cold - as well as solved the Middle East crisis, taken Kim's nukes away, and finally gotten the White House to admit that the cocaine found in Hunter's skivvies was meant for Biden's morning *Ensure,* in hopes he might stay awake for his next public appearance. But in just a six-hour period, not only was my post removed from the tiny forum, I'd learned I'd been permanently banned from the national Bookseller page. I stared at my computer with my mouth on the floor. A few minutes passed before the youngest of my alters - the most damaged one of all - tearfully asked:
"What just happened, Sir?"
Truth be told, this really wasn't a surprise. The Barnes and Noble Unauthorized Bookseller Breakroom Facebook page is known for its unabashedly-intolerant Moderators. They claim not to be biased of course, but what they mean by "unbiased" is the same unbias as CNN allowing Nancy Pelosi a solid 90 seconds (in a 3-minute prime time segment) to seethingly fat-shame Donald Trump on Cooper's show, a few years back. I actually got in trouble on the BN page, on the day following Trump's 2016 election. When I'd visited the forum that morning, I found it filled with scathing anti-Trump posts, clearly violating the room's rules on political debate. The posts were heinous. One Trans Woman even had the audacity to change her profile photo to all-black, because of the horror, the horror, the horror, of now having to live under a Republican administration, as Trump was no doubt going to stop gay marriage, lock all us leathermen into our basement dungeons, and hold down all the tranny's to sew their penises back on (which would be impossible of course, because their old dicks would be medical waste). I watched the room for hours. It was an anti-Trump free-for-all. About 1pm, I'd finally had enough, and wrote a very tender post trying to calm everyone down. But my post was removed immediately, and one of the MODs actually BLOCKED me, personally. I was literally the lone voice of reason, yet even as a gay man with a crippling cognitive disability, I was (ahem) "spanked." I encourage you to read the blogs I posted during this period (they're in "Dave's Blog Archive" in my toolbar above), as I make the case proving the Democrat's hypocrisy - and how dangerous that really is for us in the LGBTQ community. I mean, yeah, sure, of course it's nice when your party's in power, but as history has proven, the pendulum will swing back. And when you suddenly find yourself on the other side of a coordinated media attack, you'll find yourself in h i v e s, and holding a knife to your wrists because intolerance brought you to suicide, as it recently did to me a few months back ...
"If you EVER make tripe like this again...!" Going back to the themes within Saturday Night Fever, "repression" was another big one. The film just oozes human bondage, in a way that feels almost...*sticky*. Tony's clearly a talented dancer. He belongs on a stage, not a hardware store. Yet, despite his obvious gift for dancing, he is given no encouragement whatsoever to pursue his dreams, to live a life that will make him happy, to finally achieve his full potential. But his family will have none of it. Tony's unemployed Father is furious he didn't contribute to the family food budget, after getting a meager raise at his dead-end job. I was reminded of myself in a way, on the last day of 7th Grade back in 83', when I handed my mother a failing report card - and a year's worth of gifted hand-drawn cartoons, that I'd drawn all year during lunch hours, as I had no friends because I was gay. I was devastatingly lonely. Rather than seeing my obvious Bobby C cry for HELP, Mother floored the accelerator on our slant-back SeVille, and forced me to make phone calls for summer school once we got home. She berated me the entire drive. I don't remember what happened when Father got home himself hours later, but again I have cognitive issues from an untreated childhood concussion in 1973. But it's the shame that I remember most (well, that - and the beautiful car), and it's a shame I carried for over forty years. I'm a gifted cartoonist. I'm a gifted writer. I also suspect I might be a gifted film director, with how *searingly* visual I wrote When People Go Away to be. My parents gave me no encouragement whatsoever. They never sat me down to plan college or retirement. When I started coming home drunk in my early twenties, they never pulled me aside to warn of my family's dangerous predisposition for alcoholism, on both sides, killing both of my grandfathers with cirrhosis. Though well-meaning, Father's attempt at "the sex talk" with me was embarrassing. Chuckling. Back in 75', I remember putting on a puppet show for my parents at home one afternoon. (NO, Touche friends - it's not the same puppet show!🤣) It was a simple play, really. Two little puppets went walking through a forest and got caught in a giant spider's web. (I forget - what's the definition of "Foreshadowing," again?) Their reaction was tepid. The play was immediately forgotten. A decade later, when I wrote my first screenplay, my Mother read the manuscript while I was at school, and was furious when I came home: "WHY DID YOU WRITE ABOUT ME!?" The basic gist of my typewritten story was that an overprotective Mother caught her son kissing another man, and she reacted so badly, he *split* into two different people. (Again, what was that "Foreshadowing" definition...?). The foreshadowing in this case however, was Mother's reaction to my first two novels: "Was the book about meeeeeeeee...?" It wasn't until after completing WPGA that I realized the theme of my first book Goodbye to Beekman Place - "Shh - No Talking!" - was an obvious metaphor for child molestation. Ahem. Like the Barnes & Noble Facebook page, there's one particular "woman" that I've always wanted to say this to: "Bitch, please! And I mean that in both definitions of the word." But she'd never get it, though. Mother actually still thinks that GTBP is dedicated to her and my late Father. But then, she hasn't read the novel's dedication very...carefully.
Moving on ...
Moving on ...
"Careful with that Benson & Hedges, Darling." In addition to Saturday Night Fever, I also showed Dane his first episode of Absolutely Fabulous. As he's a young man of 30, he'd never even heard of the show - HOW IS THIS EVEN POSSIBLE? I chose the "Birthin'" episode from Season Five to introduce him to the series, then followed with the series finale - where Patsy lights a cigarette with the 2012 Olympics torch. It was fun to observe his reaction. And it was fun for me to rewatch a few episodes, as the writing in the last two seasons was really tight & concise. I love how shocking British humor can be when compared to American shows, and the episodes we saw saw were chalk-full of delicious daggers, as Patz' n' Eddie (What are French & Lumley now - in their 80s or 90s?) verbally assaulted everyone around them, with a total disregard for anything even close to political correctness. I loved when Patsy sneezed and shat herself. I almost masturbated when Eddie's described her vagina as "flapping saloon doors." (Standing to CLAP again.) I haven't seen the original seasons for a few years, and though they were biting, I don't recall them being so caustic. But what saddened me a little was that I'd assumed all gay men of Dane's age knew the show. I mean, everyone knows the Village People. Everyone seems to know who Liberace was. Two years ago, a pup in his fifties pulled me aside after Touche's New Year's Party. He complimented my leather, and thanked me for my "presence" - a term used to describe Masters & Sirs who take the lifestyle seriously. He then went on to share how sad he was that the current generation of leathermen ("The New Guard") have no idea the sacrifices that were made by men like me, who went through the intolerant 1970s, and later, the AIDS epidemic. It was a melancholy way to end the evening, but I actually didn't mind, as I like to *reflect.*
After dumping the sad pup's body in the dumpster behind the bar (kidding), I took the freeway home and settled in for the 40-minute drive. As usual, I was listening to WLS in my truck, and the refrain of The Thompson Twin's 🎶Lay Your Hands on Me🎶 filled my pickup's dark cabin, the ballad's haunting chorus making eddies within the dashboard's glow. I settled back in my gear, placed a gloved hand on the steering wheel, and tugged down the brim of my Muir. It's true what they say about one's perception changing as one gets older, and that's definitely been the case for me ...
I don't know if it's a quirk of multiple personalities, or a growing awareness of the greater cosmic consciousness, as humanity evolves into what we are meant to become. The universe is built on love, and an Intelligent Design that we're only just beginning to comprehend. But we'll never truly experience the joy of our Almighty's Divine Creation if we keep fearing new ideas, and making assumptions that we shouldn't. Unless we learn to accept something as simple as an R on another voter's card, we'll never reach our species' potential - and reach the moment that Tony Marino did, when he crossed the Brooklyn Bridge, without looking back.
I dream of the day when we can all just be the people we're destined to be ...
I just hope I'm not having a Fever Dream.✨
- Sir Dave
After dumping the sad pup's body in the dumpster behind the bar (kidding), I took the freeway home and settled in for the 40-minute drive. As usual, I was listening to WLS in my truck, and the refrain of The Thompson Twin's 🎶Lay Your Hands on Me🎶 filled my pickup's dark cabin, the ballad's haunting chorus making eddies within the dashboard's glow. I settled back in my gear, placed a gloved hand on the steering wheel, and tugged down the brim of my Muir. It's true what they say about one's perception changing as one gets older, and that's definitely been the case for me ...
I don't know if it's a quirk of multiple personalities, or a growing awareness of the greater cosmic consciousness, as humanity evolves into what we are meant to become. The universe is built on love, and an Intelligent Design that we're only just beginning to comprehend. But we'll never truly experience the joy of our Almighty's Divine Creation if we keep fearing new ideas, and making assumptions that we shouldn't. Unless we learn to accept something as simple as an R on another voter's card, we'll never reach our species' potential - and reach the moment that Tony Marino did, when he crossed the Brooklyn Bridge, without looking back.
I dream of the day when we can all just be the people we're destined to be ...
I just hope I'm not having a Fever Dream.✨
- Sir Dave