humanissome

I just read something I wrote in the 90s, ostensibly to a friend but I didn't send it. Oh no, I put it online instead! Though the color combination & text style I chose was, I believe, intended to discourage readers! See, it was many years before I came out to myself, and the unsent note is addressed to a straight guy friend. We were in our early twenties! I could say a lot more some day when I have time but the basic conundrum is that this guy was drawn to hanging out with me, because I'm one of the most interesting people to talk to 🙃 and at the same time I made him uncomfortable. I am emotionally open, nearly always as much as possible, going back decades. His interest/discomfort puzzled me. In the note I reference a then-recent interview I had seen, starting by saying that I was:

thankful... that we're even able to talk about any of this at all. When Mike Leigh was on Charlie Rose, Charlie made some comment how in “Career Girls” these two old roommates meet up and talk very intensely, about serious personal matters + how Charlie thinks this works cause they're women. Or, really he said: “Women talk about things like this, and men don't. ...I find when I'm with other guys I'm talking about sports or politics.” This made me want to retch — mostly because I don't like Charlie Rose. But anyway I think, before pondering making a similar film with male characters, Mike Leigh just said, “Some men do talk like that.”

So I'm glad to be among the “some” of Mike Leigh than the “all” of Charlie Rose. Of course, that doesn't mean I feel entirely comfortable.

There's a video on YouTube titled, “Terrible Interviewer, Great Interviews” & that's how I felt about Charlie Rose always. Truly I'm not speaking in hindsight. I always felt personal dislike for Charlie Rose while avidly consuming his interviews as a rare example of intelligent conversation on tv. The exchange that I quote above pretty well explains it. For the demographics of his audience Charlie would have on a Mike Leigh. But Charlie is going to talk as if “all men are like ____,” because (as the whole world now knows) Charlie Rose is demented. His conscience clearly wasn't adequately developed, though that did not prevent his ascendence to the heights of broadcasting. Such revelations should cause a thorough reexamination of our media culture, but instead the powers that be in US society will pantomime outrage at a small number of individual failings while ensuring that current systems endure. They will stoke rumblings that changes—any progressive changes ever—are “going too far” and that stability demands regression to the mean, a state in which the powers at be remain the powers that be, minus one Charlie Rose. Even those minor penalties, of individual scoundrels chased from polite society, are only temporary. America can abide no improvement at all, for improvement implies that we weren't already perfect. Exceptionalism!