Is there any minority on Planet Earth not screaming for their rights? Me, I can’t wait for all the flushed, aborted foetuses to come storming out the sewers, and demand time to grow their dicks and pussies! Seriously, though, the LGBT sandwich gets thicker every day, as science and sociology fiddle with sex faster than a gold-medal, Olympic wanker!
It’s about time, but bizarrely, gay rights are often diametrically opposed to what, awkwardly, we have to call ‘gender-variant’ – GV? – rights. It’s a conundrum first definitively addressed by Mark Simpson’s landmark ‘Anti-Gay’ polemic, stressing there’s far more to gay life than show tunes and Quentin Crisp affectations. Duh, you think? Isn’t every closeted, bi-curious ‘straight’ guy stuck in a pussy-penetrating dead end, just gagging to be spread-eagled by gay, alpha cock? Outside the graveyards of heterosexual Essex marriage beds, gay sex means thrills and possible fatal excess, like playing hangman’s noose on GHB!
Much more excitingly, these issues are being explosively addressed by performance artists David Hoyle and Lazlo Pearlman, the FTM trans activist. Renowned for shows where he wanders naked through an audience, his pussy a living contradiction on a male-muscled body, Pearlman is pure subversive provocation. But where does gender end and performance begin? That’s the question posed by French filmmaker Catherine Breillart in her 2004 movie Anatomy Of Hell, a bombshell assault on static, sexual role-playing.
Feeling sexually worthless watching horny guys in a gay bar – wouldn’t you? – an anonymous woman pays an anonymous queen to watch her masturbate and fuck. But the woman’s viewpoint is hardly flattering; Breillat’s camera frames gay sex with the cool detachment of a behavioural psychologist, a rhythmic monotony of come-fuck-me, dog-in-heat beats!
But, is there life beyond the fag-hag and screaming queen duets of tabloid clichés? You bet; Madame tries to demolish M’sieur’s emotional indifference – the source of his self-contained strength – with raw, graphic revelation.
Screw pushing the sexual envelope; Breillat shreds it like a bayonet in a kidnap victim’s belly! Broken taboos spurt like hot spunk in a gyno-centric haemorrhage; Madam pulls her tampon calculatingly out, then in, demanding M’sieur drink a glass of her menstrual blood! If he’s at first rabidly gynophobic – ‘I bless the day I was born immune to you and all women’ – he later peers at her pussy with an anglepoise lamp like a lost child, then outlines her orifices with lipstick before bewildered penetration.
Is she just an object, or a real person, like all men whose penises visibly perform a spectacular, ejaculatory act? Can 50% of humanity – women – really be passively invisible, and if so, aren’t transsexuals even more so, as we deliberately murder our cocks, and arguably become an absence, not a presence? Uncomfortably acute, Breillat’s movie pricks phallocentric thinking where it hurts; M’sieur even inserts a rake in Madam’s eagerly willing cunt to reconfigure her as living, Cubist art, a sculpture he’s more comfy with than a human being!
Like Lazlo’s Pearlman’s often theatrically-displayed, keyhole-shaped pussy, Breillat’s movie invites –or, rather, demands – a whole rewrite of sexual dignity beyond petulant, pressure groupings. Frankly, there’s a far wider, sexual world out there than willing butts or snatches, and even Breillat, with her shockingly intimate honesty, is barely exposing the tip of an unexplored, erotic iceberg. After all, we live in a world where even a six-foot-four, male Olympic champion – Bruce Jenner – can become a transsexual diva to die for, so maybe 2017 really is the dawn of a new, gender-variant utopia!
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