| | Also posted on the Batcave. Original version found there.
In 1979, The Village People released a single called, ”Go West”. In 1992, English group The Pet Shop Boys did a cover version for an AIDS benefit concert in Manchester which later spawned a video.
There’s a lot going on here and I’m going to try and cover it all, so stick with me to the end and then email me your hatred.
Both The Village People (named after New York City’s Greenwich Village) and The Pet Shop Boys (named for the occupation of some friends of the band members) are composed of openly gay men. Many of their most popular songs are embraced by gays as the distinct product of homosexual culture. “Go West” was written as a reference to the migration of gays to San Francisco in the late seventies.
Ah, the seventies. For sex it was a “golden” time. For the first time in human history it was possible to live as free a sexual existence as one’s tastes permitted, free of social, legal and biological restraint. Women had legalized abortion and contraceptive pills. Pornography was easily available in any major city. While one could use a condom, sexually transmitted diseases could be treated with simple antibiotics. Recent developments in gay activism had opened the door to the gay pride movement. While public opinion of homosexuality was far from warm, gays clustered in specific neighborhoods, fostering a unique sub-culture. It was a “good” time for free sex.
The Human Immunodeficiency Virus has shady and unclear origins in the jungles of Africa. The first case of the Acquired ImmunoDeficiency Syndrome in the United States was a Haitian immigrant who unknowingly brought it into the country in 1959. But the virus had little opportunity to spread, as it can only jump from one person to another through human bodily fluids (such as blood or semen). In particular, one man, a gay Quebecois flight attendant named Gaëtan Dugas, went across North America for years, having sex with hundreds of men annually. Even after being told he was sick with “gay cancer” and could spread it to others, he was pathologically reckless, personally infecting an estimated 2,500 people before dying in 1984. Just how much he is personally responsible for the AIDS epidemic in the U.S. and Canada is open to debate. But what can be determined is this: Dugas made AIDS a gay disease. Without him, the virus would have remained predominantly in the homosexual population and spread at a much slower rate.
The result is that AIDS shaped gay culture more than any other single thing. In the eighties, gay men were dropping like flies. More so than the rejection by their families, more so than their flamboyance, AIDS made gays untouchable in a very literal sense. Before doctors narrowed down the specifics, it was a distrust of “otherness” made palpable by some mysterious illness. You can play politics all you like with what happened in the government and why the reaction took so long, but the truth is that HIV/AIDS is a nasty bugger (no pun intended). It attacks the immune system itself, the very mechanism of the body harnessed by a vaccine to create immunity. Only after nearly twenty years of medical research have there been any minor breakthroughs in treatment. Cures or vaccines are still in the distant future.
But on to the weird video.
The 1993 video made by the Pet Shop Boys was made when deaths from AIDS in the U.S. were at an all time high (they did not decline until 1996). Some pointed out how the men marching up the steps are those who died of AIDS. The lyrics were altered slightly, adding in the line about the air being free and taking a stand for the promised land. The video is chock full of soviet and communist iconography: red flags, red stars, strong workers marching in perfect step, the promise of a new utopian dawn marked by brotherhood and harmony. Yeah, the song was written gay, but with the choir chanting about being “together” and the visuals of communism’s new frontier being in “the west,” specifically America, I can’t help but say that this is no longer an exclusively gay song.
Like “YCMA,” “Go West” seems to have a life of it’s own. It’s an anthem of freedom existing in a non-specific place; a kind of “grass is always greener” thing going on. It can also be taken as a straight parody of Communist propaganda, the over the top promise of a brave new world of tomorrow, with voluntary and spontaneous unanimity, radically unrealistic projections of production and technological advance. And the dude waving the scepter around? Totally benevolent and absolute ruler over the people.
But I’m neither gay nor a communist. I in fact strongly oppose both.
And what the hell is a “homophobe”? “Fear of the same”? “Fear of homo(sexual)s”? I certainly have no fear of gays. (I’m not too keen on being butt-raped though.) But gays? I’ll take a pass. Yes, the Bible says to kill them, but that isn’t in the Ten Commandments. What a lot of people don’t realize is that a lot of the rules in the Torah are civil regulations for the Ancient Nation of Israel formed when the Hebrews left Egypt and settled in Canaan. Rules telling the Israelites to kill gays, witches and adulterers only applied to the civil government that would exist. The enduring and eternal part of God’s Law, the part that Jesus talked about a lot, dealt with personal conduct, the Law set in the hearts of men by God to govern their every thought. So homosexuality is a sin? Big deal, so is every other form of sex other than a life-long, monogamous, heterosexual marriage between two people who love each other. And what’s the preoccupation with sex? The Bible is equally stern about mouthing off to your parents, lying, deceit, theft, greed, selfishness, jealousy, murder, idolatry, and breaking the holiness of the Sabbath.
The deal is I like the song, and I like the video. But that’s human art for you: beauty mixed up with the virtues of humanity-in-the-absence-of-God. And that’s what the two trees in the Book of Genesis are about: two ways of living. On the one hand is the Tree of Life, the way of living under God’s Law, with his spirit in you, contrasted with the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, life in God’s absence with all its “freedom,” glory and pain. “By the sweat of your brow you shall eat bread all the days of your life . . . From dust you were made and from dust you shall return.” Thus were Adam and Eve sentenced for having rejected God and his authority: they and their descendants (meaning us) choosing right and wrong for ourselves, insisting that we will get it right, we just need a few more centuries.
Well, I can say this: sitting on the edge of Western Civilization, about as far west as you can go without falling in the ocean, where I can feel the sun in wintertime, where blue skies shine with open air, I see only war and death for humanity. Every day, I can see the best our species has to offer in this massive metropolis. All I have to do is read the news to find out about how bad it gets too. I pray that I only have to read about it, that I never have to live it. But world events are rapidly moving to a point where the Western world will be challenged in a way that will nearly destroy it. America will be steamrolled by events and Europe will unite in some sort of Neo-Fascist regime, climaxing in a disastrous war over the fate of the Holy Land.
Gay people? Their the least of my worries.
|
| | Posted 3/14/2008 12:44 PM - 210 Views - 0 eProps - 2 comments
- recommend
  - recs0
- share
- email
 - sent0
|
