My Straight Shame

A few moons ago, on the urging of the shimmering Will St. Leger I took it upon myself to delve into the twisted, murky, depraved depths of straightness. Yes, for a whole month, I renounced my quiet gay lifestyle and plunged into the life of a straight man for Will's Butcher Queers radio show.

I discovered many things, how addicted I was to moisturizer and the word 'steamer' and, disturbingly, my man bag. My eyes were opened more so by other people's views when I conducted a survey. Highlights of said responses will be listed at the end of the post.

BEFORE



Going off in a tangent, one thing I did was to look at the difference between lads mags such as Nuts and Zoo and girls/gays mags such as Heat. Surprisingly, if I was forced at nail file point, I'd plump for the former. Guys mags, in between the rubbery tits and non-muff, actually had mildly clever and interesting articles, product reviews that didn't use the words 'pinktastic' or measure the quality of albums with 'two lipsticks out of five'. The editors and contributors of Heat on the other hand should be keep behind barbed wire and deprived of their Malibu Bay Breeze for marching into the battle to leech people of their very minds, their baby pink glitter banners held high.

AFTER



Peruse below, if you will, the transcript of said radio interview, read in amusement as I turn from a foul mouthed club goer, if you have the audacity to call Copper Face Jacks a nightclub and not a circle of hell, into a nice lady in her mid fifties attached to her bag....

Will - Our next guest is Peter Dunne, who’s here in the studio, welcome, Peter.

Putrid - (Deep, rough voice) Thanks Will.

Oh my God, you’ve changed completely. We sent him out as part of a social experiment, we sent our little gay Peter out into the straight world to see how he’d get on. Peter, welcome back.

Thanks very much.

I love the look by the way, the Leinster top.

The Leinster top, yeah, I’ve been wearing the same boots since the 31st of December.

Wow.

Without changing them.

Without changing them, that’s a very straight thing to do.

Very.

Or is it, am I making an assumption by saying that?

Well, I think an awful lot of it is all assumption but, em, going to a certain nightclub the other night, it turns out that most of those assumptions are... frighteningly true.

So are we talking about Coppers here.

We are talking about Coppers, Will.



Tell us how that went.

Well, it was a bit of a... cesspit, to be honest, saying that though, I went with my boyfriend, who was my chaperon, and went in and the venue isn’t bad it’s kind of a nice venue, if there was another night there, like Mother, or Party Monster or something, you’d think it was brilliant and what stuck out to me was they had a big screen tv in the corner and they were showing that Kathy Bates film 'Dolores Claiborne' where she takes care of that old woman and the old woman pisses herself deliberately and I was thinking this is a brilliant venue, look at the things they’re showing on the walls! Then even when we went out to the smoking section they have this brilliant LED screen on the wall, really impressive, so I’m thinking this place is grand, or whatever. So, Donncha went off to get drinks and within two minutes a full on scrap, punching scrap, started right beside me! They were killing each other and then the best part was the bouncers came over, pulled them off each other and then let them all stay. (Laughs)

Really, they didn’t kick anyone out?

Kicked nobody out.

That wouldn’t happen in a gay club would it.

(STILL laughing) Totally not. Oh, and everywhere, they had these strategic mops and buckets hidden under things, just strategically.

You’re kidding.

Yep. And no one could dance.

They can’t dance?

Even the girls can’t dance. No one can dance.

What do the girls look like there?

They look like Girls Aloud would have looked like 10 years ago. Even though Girls aloud aren’t that old.

Wow.

They looked immaculate but there wasn’t a bit of originality about them, they just looked great. And the music, there was nothing that was played that wasn’t about 7 or 8 months old, like, em, The Ting Tings 'That’s Not My Name' and you know that 'Call On Me' song, that was the kind of music they were playing. Nothing new.

Oh.

The toilets had, (laughs), no locks, no toilet seats, so if you wanted to take a poo forget about it, but, em, the interesting thing was, with the graffiti on the toilets, no matter where you go, Will, gay bar, straight bar, everyone sucks cock. Totally.

They, they write..

I’ll suck your cock, ring this number to get your cock sucked, it seems like it’s a man thing rather than a sexuality thing.

Might go to Coppers now.

Yeah. (laughs)

What was, did they, was there cock graffiti?

Yes,(firmly), less spurting than usual.

Hairy balls?

No, they didn’t put as much effort into the balls, Will (Will laughs) I think it was about the instant gratification, not about the accessories.

That’s fantastic, I love it. What else did you get up to?

Well, the makeover, well, it has to be said, the one big thing about the makeover was – no man bag. You would not realise how that has been, apart from the whole lack of sex thing, the man bag has been the most difficult thing of all, like, where do you carry stuff? Everything...if it doesn’t fit in your pocket you can’t bring it.

What do you have in your man bag anyway?



Books, or like, little notes for yourself, if you're going to be doing anything during the day.

Books, what, like French drama? Petrarchan verse? Oscar Wilde? (Both laugh)

You know, things that are translated from the original Russian, Will, yeah.

That’s hilarious, I mean, what do you normally carry round, what’s an essential? Keys wallet, phone.

Em, books,all the time, have to have something to read, have to have something to write on, have to have something to write with, little things, that I, you know if you remember, you have to bring something to somebody or you have to collect something , you just need space, like all little reminders, lucky things, things like that. God, I sound like a girl. (Laughs) But that’s what I would carry. Now, just wallet, phone.

But since you’ve gone away from the man bag do you think you want to go back straight..

(Interrupts) Totally, I can’t wait. Even just for reading, instead of carrying a book under my arm I’d just go,'Oh I won’t read'.

Ok. You know, in having conversations, lets say, like, with your friends, I know you couldn’t go to any gay places.

Sure.

Stuff like that, did you find it frustrating not to be able to go out?

Yeeeah. Yes and no, well the money I saved was amazing, like even, we have a mutual friend Lisa, it was her birthday in Mother, and I couldn’t go to Mother so I just went to the after party.

Ok.

So things like that ,(interrupts self), even though the after party was brilliant.

Yes, amazing, it was a great after party. (laughs)

Fantastic.

It was...now, you didn’t break the rules because it was in a straight persons flat.

Exactly, and gays took over.

They did. Conor brought in a disco ball and a smoke machine and a light and they actually turned it into a disco in less than 10 seconds.

It was brilliant, but the room was kind of, so small that when you turned on the smoke machine, within 30 seconds everyone was choking.



Ah they were. We talked in the last show about peoples attitudes, let's say, towards what the difference is between gay and straight people. What did you find?

Well, what I actually did was like a Family Fortunes style thing. I honestly surveyed 100 people, Will, and compiled their answers and got the top 5 answers for, the question was, apart from the sexual aspect, apart from the sex, what would you say is the main difference between a gay man and a straight man? So they could be serious, they could be tongue in cheek and so I got a top 5!

Wow.

Would you like to hazard a guess, Will?

I’d love to have a go.

Ok, go on.

Great, so the number one... I’m gonna say... I’m aiming for the number one difference. Hmm, the number one difference between a gay man and a straight man, it’s gonna sound really shallow but I would say it’s the way they.. between the way they dress?

Well,that was number 2.

That’s not bad.

Grooming was number 2. Number 1, which I kind of thought was a little bit sad and it was an overwhelming number one by about 60 or 70 percent, was their relationships with women.

Oh.

And it was mainly women that said this, because I asked women, I asked straight men I asked gay men in the survey and women said that straight men don’t really listen to them and that they feel safer around gay men, that they can actually talk to a gay man without there being a fear of something underlying, like, sex will have to come out of this.

Oh.

Number 2 was grooming. Number 3 was emotions, that straight men don’t show their emotions as much, which is interesting, Number 4, which was a bit of a cliche – musicals. (laughs)

Just musicals?

That straight men don’t like musicals.

I’m trying to think now of a musical that a straight man would like...em..

Ju..em..no.(both laugh)

Cats?

Pussy, more like.

Pussy! That’s fantastic. What was Number 5?

And Number 5 was proving your masculinity.

What do they mean by that?

That straight men would be more aggressive, more competitive, that they have to fit into the role of a man, like what is a mans place? A man's place is to be in charge, a man's place is to be the breadwinner, the champion, the hunter gatherer kind of thing.

Wow. Well,thank you so much for doing this. I think we’re gonna have Peter again back on the show.

You better.


I repeat, he better. We close now with the aforementioned highlights of the survey. They go from the sublime to the ridiculous, I leave it to you to guess whether it was a woman or a man, a straight or a gay who said it. You'll probably guess correctly.



I really don't get most musicals, or Judy Garland, or fisting.

Gay men suffer a psychic rape on account of their sexuality at the hands of culture and society. Straight men suffer an obligation to marry and have children at the hands of culture and society. Gay men suffer a need to conform to this obligation.
Straight men suffer a need to be a bit more gay.

Unlike straight men, gay men don't believe every straight guy fancies them.

I think a wide knowledge of strangely named sex acts which make words like trombone hilarious.

Straight guys tend to look rather sheepish the next morning after sleeping with gay gays, I guess that would be the main difference.

I think that sometimes, like women, there is no shame in navigating between high and low art easily. Whereas straight men would find it difficult or would not want to negotiate a conversation that swung from the inanities of the 'Hills' to a Dennis Cooper short story, there are no boundaries in art or embarrassment in taking the flippant a little bit seriously for my male gay friends anyway but as I said this is just my opinion and I don't think it goes across the board for all gay males!

Obviously, its how much more comfortable straight women are with gay men than straight. A woman could let a complete strange gay man feel her boobs, kiss her, be completely in her personal space, but if a straight man did it...bye bye balls.

Gay men don't care what a clitoris is...bugger...do straight men care either?

Gay men dress better, smell better and generally take more pride in their appearance than a straight bloke and usually they understand us girlies more...pity they dont want a go of a vagina sometimes.

Straight men don't trim their arse hair.



PUTRID DUNNE

Films of 2011

All in all I've had a great year sitting in the dark. And sometimes I went to the pictures. I probably saw more films this year than any other and while there were a few films that were grand but I couldn't comprehend why people went crazy over them, like Hugo and Drive, there very few things I thought were absolute drivel, like The Guard,(THE GUARD - 'hurry up, I'm tumescent' for feck sake), or Battle Los Angeles ('Maybe I can help, I'm a veterinarian') it was surprisingly simple to pick out a top ten.

So I did.


10 Rise Of The Planet Of The Apes



I’m half scarlet and hugely surprised that this made the top 10 but honestly, it’s very good! Maybe I was influenced by bringing my pregnant friend Aoife who was convinced it would drive her unborn child feral. Forget Franco, no, seriously, lets forget him totally in 2012, it was all about Caesar the ape. The moment where he grabbed the stick from Draco Malfoy (if he didn’t want to be typecast he could at least have dyed his hair a less Slytherin shade) and shouted ‘No!’ really shook me and made me hope new baby Isla WOULD grow up to lead an army of monkeys across San Francisco. They’d be welcomed with open arms in the Castro.


9 Blue Valentine



I really didn't think I was going to like this, it just sounded like a mountain of pretentious wank and Michelle Williams always comes across as a pissy bitch in interviews. Well I had me mouth shut up, didn't I now.

It shows the meet up and break up of a couple and does a bang up job of showing both sides of the argument with your loyalties swinging from one to the other. Ryan Gosling, who manages to be really touching and annoying at the same time, is far better in this than in Drive, this was the one he should have got all the attention for. That Grizzly Bear song with the end credits is lovely. Speaking of credits, the bloody names coming up on the screen is the best thing about The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo.


8 Black Swan



Ah, nutty Natalie. Did Black Swan live up to the huge expectation I had for it? Unfortunately not, it couldn’t possibly have. It didn’t even live up to the poster. What I DID love though is the fact that for a film that was a huge success, nominated for Best Picture and won Best Actress, it was as mad as a bag of cats. From Natalie doing the five knuckle shuffle unaware that her mother is dozing on the armchair beside her bed to Winona Ryder shrieking ‘You stole my things?!’ and stabbing herself with a in the face with a NAIL FILE!! Excitement. It also lead to a deluge of Halloween costumes and a Brown Thomas window. What’s the last film where a ballerina gets eaten out by a figment of her own imagination that managed that?


7 Tyrannosaur



As depressing as the Christmas episode of Eastenders , this Brit flick began with a drunk kicking his dog to death and went downhill from there. Although it largely consisted of nothing you hadn’t seen before, grey British streets, a psychotic Eddie Marsan and a drunken, dribbly, screaming Peter Mullen, it also had something you hadn’t seen before, a revelatory performance from Olivia Coleman as a battered wife. Previously written off (by myself) as a forgettable sitcom actress, she is heart breaking. There is one scene where she comforts her husband when he tearfully apologises for beating her, he hides his head in her lap and she strokes his head, telling him it’ll be ok while the life and soul visibly drain from her face.

It actually might have made it farther up my list but mortifyingly, I totally didn’t comprehend the revelation of a shocking act, until my friend Trish explained it to me 10 minutes later, I might as well have been watching a completely different film. It reminded me of the time me and my friend Cully brought my Mam and my slightly deaf aunt, Maro, to see The Sixth Sense and as we headed home I asked my aunt what she’d thought about the twist that Bruce Willis was dead all along. ‘He was DEAD?!’, she replied.


6 Bridesmaids



Take one woman in a wedding dress having a shit in the middle of the road, add Kristen Wiig having an argument with a teenager that ends with ‘Well, you’re just a little cunt’ and yet another woman taking a shit in a sink. Rinse and repeat. This was the long overdue moment when Wiig became a star and showed the charmless idiots from Hangover how it’s done.


5 Rabbit Hole



In the interests of transparency it should be admitted that any film starring Nicole Kidman is practically guaranteed a place in my year end top ten (ah she was funny in Just Go With It, shut up everyone). It must be said, anyone who boos this choice and gives her stick obviously hasn’t seen her work in Rabbit Hole. She is simply stunning as a mother dealing with the death of her young son who strikes up a bizarre relationship with the teenager who accidentally killed him. It is however the speech given by Dianne Wiest as her mother, the most insightful and honest description of grief I’ve ever heard , that rattled me.

True story - a friend actually had dinner with a member of the film’s production team who described Nicole as ‘Odd to the point of autism’. That made me love her even more!

4 Snowtown



At a certain point during this film, my friend Maeve had her hands over her eyes, her fingers stuck in her ears and was rocking in her seat. ‘Never tell me what happened in that bathroom’, she said afterwards. No, I didn’t have a tempest in a cubicle, it was actually a torture scene in this shocking true story about an Australian serial killer who moves in with a family and slowly begins to influence one of the sons.

There was such an amazing sense of place and time, every shot, prop and actor were totally convincing, you could really believe it was a window into this world instead of a screen and it was terrifying. It was so disturbing that of course my friends and I did impressions of the worst bits – ‘Turn to the side. Drop your underpants’. Gas craic we had.




3 The Fighter



This was brilliant. Big surprise. You’d think the sporty true story comeback kid thing was played out but between this and to a marginally lesser extent Warrior, just like the leading men there was still some life in the old fighter yet. While it was his co-stars who were nominated for awards, with Christian Bale and Melissa Leo winning Oscars for their trouble, it was Mark Wahlberg, in the least showy role who was the real standout, subtly grounding the film with a great little performance as a no rate boxer, with the most entertainingly awful family, who gets a shot at the top.

There were some great lines like ‘I heard she’s into threeways’-‘Yeah, like those MTV girls’ or ‘It’s not fuckin’ ladylike to be shoutin’ in the street’!’ or the part when Mark’s sister picks up for him against his mother and she says ‘What are you doing opening your mouth in my kitchen? You owe me $200. I don't want another word outta you’.

Ah they are great lines, shut up.


2 Super 8



Finally, the kids of today have their very own equivalent of The Goonies. This is a lovely little film. Although it runs out of steam towards the end, and the monster eventually disappoints, how can you dislike a movie that goes out of its’ way to entertain and try and recreate the wonder of those 80s classics? The kids are utterly brilliant, Joel Courtney is simply perfect in the lead and Elle Fanning reveals a level of depth and lack of precocity in her acting that makes Dakota’s dream of an Oscar seem like a mirage in the desert.


1 Take Shelter



If you simply can’t think of a present for the man who has everything, how about slowly picking apart his sanity and stability and family until he has nothing left? Then just get him a cd or something.

A creeping dread permeates every minute of this unsettling and original film. By the mid point I felt sick with the tension and the expectation for something that might actually never come. Michael Shannon gives the performance of the year as a man plagued by visions of a monstrous storm who slowly begins to prepare for it as his wife and friends look on in disbelief. The audience are also witness to his visions until we aren't sure of what is real and what is a dream. The highest compliment I can give it is that I’ve never seen anything like it.


From the sublime to the scutter - this was easily the worst thing I endured in 2011. While other films may have been crap, this one seemed to go out of its' way to offend. Ah, I'm raging even remembering it.

Sucker Punch



Holy lantern God, this film was disgraceful. So much for girl power, it should have been called Attack Of The Crying Baby Prostitutes. Basically, a dozy young one shoots her sister instead of the step father molesting them, is sent to a madhouse for sexy women, which must have been roasting because they all walk around nearly in their nip. In order to figure out how to escape with her gang of fellow simpletons, she has to hypnotize dirty men with a sexy dance and IMAGINE she's any use at anything by chopping up dragons.

All the lead group of young ones end up crying at some point, their plan is foiled when the bad fella turns the blackboard they've written their secret plan on AROUND and reads it. Then they just stand there and get shot. Oh, and a lobotomy. All the while changing in and out of costumes that would look over the top at a Thai ladyboy extravaganza with the front of their heads almost tipping them over with the weight of the make up trowelled on to them.

I've made this sound great. But it's not. It is utterly rotten. There's not a shred of it that's slightly well made, exciting or intentionally amusing. I was absolutely raging leaving the cinema.

I actually wouldn't mind watching it again right now.

PUTRID DUNNE