In 1971, director Melvin Van Peebles wanted to make a dollar and a cent in this business, and God Damn It, he didn’t want it to be a movie about a white guy.  So he made a movie called “Sweet Sweetback’s BaadAssssss Song.”  Towards the end of the movie, Sweetback is left for dead in the middle of the desert.  Van Peebles himself said he was at a screening of the film, and it got to that point, and he overheard an elderly black woman quietly praying that he die here alone in the desert, and not be gunned down by the white police.  Van Peebles was shocked but not surprised that it didn’t occur to her that Sweetback could live.  Blacks didn’t survive much in the movies.  It was just something that didn’t happen.  The actual end of “BaadAssssss Song” shows Sweetback escaping from the cops, free and alive.  What happened in America after that has been described as “an explosion.”

It’s more commonly referred to today as “Blaxploitation.”

Samuel L. Jackson has said that at that time, “we [African-Americans] needed to feel better about ourselves.  Every day, you’d read about somebody being beat down, things weren’t progressing fast enough, and some black leaders were telling us to do one thing, and others were telling us to do another.”

“[In these movies,] We got to win,” said Fred Williamson, a star of many of these pictures.

Listening to these men speak, I couldn’t help but feel a sting of understanding, followed by jealousy.  We are in a time when us gays need to feel better about ourselves.  Things aren’t progressing fast enough.  We feel powerless.  And our leaders are at odds with one another as to where to take our struggle.

I wish I had movies to go to now where I could feel like being gay is cool again.  I feel like a wuss most of the time, and irrelevant for the other times.

In the 60’s, 70’s and 80’s, gays always were killed or committed suicide by the end of the film.  Or we are maddeningly peripheral to the story.  Hell, even modern, very popular gay films, like “Philadelphia,” “Brokeback Mountain” and “Milk”—They’re TRAGEDIES!!! The lovers don’t end up together in the end because one of them goes back to being straight, or one of them dies from AIDS, suicide or murder.  Or you got “Broken Hearts Club,” which is funny, but in the end is just a bunch of depression cases who would take the Straight Pill in a heartbeat were it available to them.

Hardly Pam Grier pulling a gun out of her panties and telling that turkey to freeze.

Pam Grier has since said that her early films broke down some stereotypes but created a whole lot more.  “Jackie Brown” is about sifting the cool essence out of “Coffy” and leaving behind the “pornography,” as she calls it.

I agree.  But it was cool, and it got the world dancing to their beat.  In the late 60’s, big sweeping epics were dying–they were getting more lifeless and were making less money.  Kinda like today, isn’t it?  Are we poised for another gritty, creative resurgence based in a political uprising?  I hope so, because my community aside, movies are lame now, and they need to get wilder and more unpredictable right fucking now.

The blaxploitation lineup went like this: “Sweet Sweetback,” “Shaft,” “Superfly,” “Blacula,” Foxy Brown,” Yaphett Koto showing up to villainize James Bond in “Live and Let Die,” “Coffy,” gritty bleed-overs like “French Connection” and then it was rinse and repeat until 1976, when the soul train got booted from the tracks in favor of Steven Spielberg’s San Fernando Valley suburb dreamlands.  That pretty much brings us to today, where Indiana Jones isn’t giving us the dirty business like he used to, and we’re finding it harder and harder to fake the orgasms.

But here we are again, talking about the straight and the white.

Black culture couldn’t go directly from Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks to President Obama, Bryant Gumbel on the news and Eddie Murphy’s “Daddy Day Care.”  It had to make some party bus lay-overs with Richard Roundtree, Eddie Murphy’s “Trading Places,” and What the Hell Did Jesse Jackson Just Say?

Gay culture has got a long trip on its hands, and we need something to take our minds off it, or yeah, we will be the Aunts and Uncles You Don’t Know Much About forever.

I’m not the biggest Spike Lee fan, but “Do the Right Thing” is amazing.  I am particularly drawn to the scene where Lee talks to John Turturro.  Turturro has got a big racist chip on his shoulder.  Lee asks him “Who’s your favorite athlete?” “Michael Jordan.” “Who’s your favorite singer?” “Michael Jackson.” “Who’s your favorite movie star?” “Eddie Murphy.”  Nothing more needs to be said.

In the 80’s, if you were a white guy, who was racist, but was also a huge basketball fan, there could be absolutely no denying that Michael Jordan was the best there was.  So, then, a paradox was created.  And bigotry never wins in that kind of paradox.  Because it isn’t real.  It falls away like dead skin in the face of what’s more vital.  In our hypothetical man’s case, it would be the love of the game.  When a homophobic person becomes less so, it is always because love wins out.  Compassion for a fellow human being.  Understanding.  Love for a son or daughter.  But that doesn’t get them all.

Specifically for gay men, our biggest hurdle is in reaching the straight man.  We don’t have a lot of common ground.  There’s usually a ill-perceived sexual danger.  And most of the time, it’s guilt by association.  I hang out with a gay guy, then I am (or more importantly, people will think I am) at least a little gay myself.

This is less of a problem for the younger generations, who are all co-mingling for the most part, but what do we do about our fathers and our fathers’ friends?

I don’t know.

Quentin Tarantino talked about going to a mostly black theater to see blaxploitation movies as a kid.  The way he speaks, you can tell it invigorated him.  He felt cool being there.  In “Trading Places,” the old, white Richard Bellamy hears Eddie Murphy singing in the bathroom, turns to his butler and says, with a bemused, intrigued smile, “They’re a very musical people, aren’t they?”

In these films, it’s cool to be black.  There’s a part of Tarantino, and Richard Bellamy, and everybody who saw those movies, that wanted to be black.

I don’t think gays have that quite yet.  The essence of “that’s so gay” is “that’s not cool.”  And that’s another thing.  I see these GLSEN bus stop ads where the gay kid says “That’s so jock who can complete a pass but not a sentence.  See? That’s how it feels when you say ‘That’s so gay.’”

LAME! Good for the community…BUT LAME!  Never in my life have I wanted more for it to be cool to be gay.

Gay culture has had its cool moments.  Actually, I should say popular moments.  Musicals, Madonna, Liza, Britney, Wicked, Gypsy, Sex and the City, Patti LuPone, Desperate Housewives.  See how I have yet to mention any actual gay people on this list?  We’re only popular by proxy!  And Desperate Housewives?? It was years before Fag Marc Cherry put any prominent gay people into his own ‘mo show!  And they are SOOOOO BORING, you guys.  Definitely not Vogue.

So come on, faggots (yes, PC be damned, we’re taking our words back too; we are faggots, and I think we should call each other that more often)! We’re wittier, we’re smarter, we’re more interesting, our lives are shinier, and our sex is more fun.  I say we take these stereotypes and fucking own them!  Our political heads are so busy trying to make us look normal and ordinary so that we can get our rights, that they’ve actually succeeded in one thing: they’ve made us normal and ordinary.  Listen up: We’re not!  We are different, we are sassy, and yeah, we’re kinda freaks.

And I think it’s time us fags start feeling all sexy and good about that.

Right now, we’ve got Adam Lambert and Neil Patrick Harris, and I know my people, and I think we can get funkier than that.

Let’s make some gay movies and TV and comedy and let’s make it look like the blast it is!  Who knows? It could be the thing that gets us our rights.