Of course, I'm serious!

 

First there was Errol, then Dirk.......

who set the stage first for off-kilted romantic examples for those such as I.....I don't remember the film, but I do remember a scene that I viewed as an adolescent, in which Dirk, in arty clothing that was hardly fashionable for a romantic lead, casts a lingering eye about the dreary landscape outside the window of the controlled and contained world in which he exists, with only a glimmer of dreams in his eyes. Then, he turns away, a veil, compelled by his victorian indoctrinations, falling across his vision....then, after a fraction of a second, he turns, sharply, again looking out the same window.....the scene comes into sharp focus....he lifts a brow of acknowledgment...looks inward......(cut to the door)...a voice....."Are you all right, in there?"

Luncheon on the Sofa or behind the hanging shirts......just get on with it!

after an adolescence spent in the late 50's, wherein only subtle, sometimes imperceptible, references were seldom made to the emerging sexualities of kids, like myself, who were seeking alliances outside the mainstream of suppression which reigned from the end of WWII until the liberating influence of the French, who were still largely homophobic, and the English, who unwittingly released their hold on the "one foot on the floor" sexuality with "Women in Love" and even a Dirk Bogarde film, "Victim", a claustrophobic and paranoid take on the phobia, 20 years before that. ......The scene, from "Eating Out", still conveys the current mindset of repression......Another 20 years....over a century after the trials of Oscar Wilde....and the veil will perhaps have been lifted.....at least in the big cities that hover above the morass of guilt and desperation, upon intellectual freedom and sexual nonchalance......

SALLY POTTER

After "Singing in the Rain"........there's "The Tango Lesson"....with the wonderful, most splendid, Sally Potter and the really hot Pablo Veron....

BILLY ELLIOT AND THE ULTIMATE MIKEL

at 6, i began dance classes with Hazel Robinson.......not many boys my age had the interest or the coordination for dance.....nevertheless, shamelessly, i undertook the
way of Gene Kelly, practicing in the gym and auditorium of West Clinton Elementary School, assiduously avoiding the playground of neanderthal children who would tease me for this sissy stuff, during their breaks from arguing, wrestling and boxing with one another.......i continued dance class through high school, and took some classes as an adult in modern and classical. I had no discipline for the pain and torture of dance, however.....and, in my twenties, danced alone and with friends to Balinese temple music and free-form expressive dance......when BILLY ELLIOT came out, old emotions came to the surface.......yea.....Billy.....go for it! Dance your heart out! Then there's the grown-up version......with technique.....Mikhail Baryshnikov!