Went to see Milk Sunday night with my hot Spanish man-toy, J.  I wouldn't say Milk is a date film, but all the porn 'staches on display make up for it.  A lot of people have trashed James Franco, for some reason, but he had the best little mustache of the lot.  Not everyone looks good in a 'stache, as is well known, but not everyone looks half bad either...


One young blogger ended his review of Milk this way:

oh and P.S. fuck James Franco. 

I hate him and hope he does because hes so charming that i drives me crazy. Hes not unbelievably hot, but he has those stupid weirdo glossy squinty eyes which he uses to summon tears in every role. Hes playing Allen Ginsberg in a movie coming out called Howl. His mother is a poet, and hes playing a gay poet. This shows that hes going to dominate the role, and I'm not going to be able to watch it because seeing him and knowing that being his friend is as unattainable as owning a farm of lampreys.

I'm not sure how unattainable a lamprey farm is, in truth. I think it's actually pretty doable. So don't be hatin'.  There's hope. The problem seems to be, as David Close of the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation says: “Lampreys are not as glamorous as salmon, so society doesn't pay very much attention.”

Franco doesn't strike me as someone who's good-looking enough to be resented for his looks. In fact, I find his looks utterly inoffensive. It's not painful to look at him, as it is some painfully good-looking lads. I could basically take him or leave him, which is just where you want them most of the time, innit?

The movie itself was pure hagiography. The point of the film seems to be to give today's gay movement a proper martyr. Director Gus Van Sant isn't offering a psychological portrait here, at least not a very deft one.  We get no real sense of the inner life of Harvey Milk.  Sean Penn does a good job — though people praising Penn as "amazing" are talking more about the fact that Penn's playing Milk than the performance itself, I think.  It was good, don't get me wrong, but my gaydar did not go off.  The fey hand movements and the little tilt of the head didn't do it for me.  Sorry.

Gays are funny in mixed company.  We're still very easily flattered by straight people, aren't we?  All it takes in most cases is not being reviled and rejected outright by them.  It's strange because we like to think we have high standards and impeccable taste.  But throw a middling to nothing straight guy into a gay bar full of gay men ten times better looking, and they'll be all over him in no time flat.  Take uberstraight douchebag Tucker Max...


...of I Hope they Serve Beer in Hell fame's recollection of a night out in Chicago that ended in a gay bar called the Manhole...

The funny thing was, I had probably three of the hottest guys in there hitting on me, especially Dave. That guy could get so much pussy if he was straight.

It was a very unique feeling, to be so actively and aggressively pursued by guys. Now I know what hot girls feel like, being hounded by multiple guys at once. On one hand it is a flattering feeling because of the attention and the obvious desire for you, but it kind of leaves a mildly annoying and hollow tang, because you know that all the guys really want to do is fuck, and they only care about you because of what you represent to them, not who you are as a person.

OH JESUS—DID I JUST WRITE THAT?

And he didn't even have to take his shirt off.  What I'm getting at here, is that if Milk had been played by a gay actor you'd probably hear all the gays saying, "well, she wasn't very convincing, was she?"  It's still too easy for straights to garner wild praise simply for sashaying around, lisping, and kissing a guy or two on screen. 

Even Hollywood is realizing that it's not enough to french-kiss a guy.  That's not (to borrow a phrase from Robert Downey Junior's riotously entertaining turn in Tropic Thunder) a "full-queer".  The next frontier is fellatio, of course.  Oral sex on-screen is the new french kiss for straight actors who want to show the world they can do a "full-queer."

As for the rest of them.  Emile Hirsch's performance, if you can find it under the big hair and behind the bug-eye glasses, is probably the most annoying of the bunch, playing-gaywise. Followed by Diego Luna's, although Luna's was of a different nature — he played an annoying gay, while Hirsch was annoying playing gay. I find Hirsch somewhat annoying anyway, and, frankly I'm not sure why.

Director Gus Van Sant, Saint of gay indies, has long been one of the most overrated directors on the scene. But to his credit, he has dealt pretty consistently throughout his career with gay characters and issues. It made sense for him to direct Milk. I wouldn't say it's a great film, though, filmically speaking.

Its structure is simple to the point of simplistic. Milk narrates in scenes interspersed throughout the movie where he sits alone in his kitchen talking into a tape recorder. He's giving his last will and testament, and his version of things in case he's assassinated. Of course, we know he will be in the end.  Although it's not clear it's for the reasons he thought he would be.  Van Sant hints at Dan White's mixed motives, but they seem secondary to the sense you get that the director wants to show us that Harvey Milk had to die.  Dan White just happened to be the guy who pulled the trigger.

Milk's likeness to Christ comes in many forms, the most poorly executed are the phone calls from bumfuck nowhere from a young gay kid in a wheelchair whom Milk talks out of suicide.  Another is Milk's premonition that he won't make it to see his fiftieth birthday, which he tells a trick on his fortieth, in a scene in the beginning of the film which is played over in the end.  These touches are an attempt to create a mystical aura of martyrdom around Milk. 

Van Sant is clearly out to give the gay movement more than a story of chutzpah and cajones.  He wants us to have our own gay Christ.  Personally, I found the effort entertaining, if a little patronizing.  We need our history and our heroes, especially in light of the marriage equality backlash, but Van Sant lays it on a bit thick for my taste.

Afterwards, at a pub around the corner from the cinema, J. told me he thought the 1984 documentary The Times of Harvey Milk, which he'd watched in preparation for seeing the biopic, was better than Van Sant's version.  It's in my netflix queue, and I'm curious to see it now.

J. and I got beer and burgers, and he set about abusing me a little. I had asked the waitress to bring me a side of mayo for my fries.  He asked me if I didn't put ketchup on everything. That's something Europeans say to Americans.  Yanks are supposed to slather everything in ketchup.  We're supposed to be suspicious of other condiments, especially French-sounding ones that resemble a certain viscous, white substance.

I told him: sticks and stones!  I'd heard this sort of thing all the time I lived abroad.  Even in Montreal, I remember a waitress, having determined my friends and I were American, very pointedly withholding all condiments but ketchup from our table. 

J. interrupted, politely informing me that mayonnaise was not French, but Spanish in origin, which, I have to say, rocked my world.  I was fairly skeptical, since mayonnaise sounds awfully French, and something about it even tastes French to me, but he patiently explained that the condiment had come from Mahón, the capital city of the Balearic Island of Minorca, a territory of Spain.

I wasn't sure if the origin of mayo was one of those pissing contests so popular in Europe, where the matter of where anything and everything of value was invented is of vital national importance — even more so now with the EU leveling the particularities of national identity.  One thing was for sure:  I was out of the picture.  While it was finally mass-produced in America, I knew it came from someplace else.  My ego was not on the line here.  We've got Marshmallow Fluff, and I'm pretty sure I'm never going to have to debate its origins with a European.

Not so mayonnaise, which, in the words of Ambrose Bierce, is "one of the sauces which serve the French in place of a state religion."  How rich would it be if it actually came from Spain - HA HA! 

After a little research of my own, I was no closer to an answer.  As you would expect, in order to keep such a sensitive issue from exploding into outright war, at least two versions of the origins of mayonnaise are offered by experts, while maintaining that the true origins are obscure.  It's a kind of culinary detente. 

The first version gives it to France.  According to 19th century culinary writer Pierre Lacam,

The sauce may have been christened mayennaise after Charles de Lorraine, duke of Mayenne, because he took the time to finish his meal of chicken with cold sauce before being defeated in the Battle of Arques.

Another quite convincing version gives it to Spain...

Most authorities believe the first batch of this mixture of egg yolks, oil and seasonings was whipped up to celebrate the 1756 French capture of Mahón, a city on the Spanish Isle of Minorca, by forces under Louis-Francois-Armad de Vignerot du Plessis, duc de Richelieu (1696-1788). The Duke, or more likely, his personal chef, is credited with inventing mayonnaise, as his chef created a victory feast that was to include a sauce made of cream and eggs. Realizing that there was no cream in the kitchen, the chef substituted olive oil for the cream and a new culinary creation was born. Supposedly the chef named the new sauce "Mahonnaise" in honor of the Duc's victory. Besides enjoying a reputation as a skillful military leader, the Duke was also widely known as a bon vivant with the odd habit of inviting his guests to dine in the nude.

The plot thickens, however. Because at the time of Mahón's capture, it was occupied by the English!

The lesson?  History is complicated.  But if you like to dip your fries in mayonnaise, don't let that stop you.