Without even noticing it, I began to believe that certain roles and circumstances (work, home, family, you fill in the blank) were unchangeable, fixed, out of my control. I fell into patterns of behavior, ruts really, that had become comfortable, even when I knew they were wrong.

Then, just recently, I woke up. I’m not sure what snapped inside me. Maybe a whole bunch of things coalesced into a great realization: If you want something, you have to ask for it.

Asking for things has turned my life around in a matter of weeks.

Part of me groans to see this epiphany put into words, imagining you, Dear Reader, thinking either, “What an incredibly obvious, emotionally stunted person” or, “Someone has been spending a little too much time with O, The Oprah Magazine.” But bear with me for a second.

Imagine what would happen if you uttered the unspeakable truths in your life, or were just honest for once about the things you usually dissemble. (Maybe you need to ask for some space, or respect, or love, or to be heard, or just to try a different way of interacting.) Would the world end? Would the ground open and swallow you up? Would time stop? Would you pass out? Would you make someone (gasp!) uneasy? Or, just maybe, would you feel incredibly relieved? Would you even get some of what you want?

Things will change, sure. They’ll have to, because you’ve said what people have depended on you—what you’ve depended on yourself—to keep pushed down inside. Change is terrifying, and you might experience rejection. But being brave gets easier with practice. You’ll change, if only because it’s become too painful not to.

Most of my life has been good behavior punctuated with occasional rewards when someone happens to notice. It worked well for the first few decades. It’s how I first found a profession, a relationship, a city to call my own. It never occurred to me that it was a mostly passive way of being, or that it would eventually fail me.

Everyone wants to be acknowledged, to have someone say, “I see you.” The most surprising part about asking for things is that a lot of the time, people say yes.

Obviously the writers of the movies (and of the plays and books that became movies) of this era knew they were introducing characters who were in some sense queer. The actors seem to know precisely what they’re communicating. But for the popular viewer, how much did they know? How did they see these films? What did they think was happening in them? It’s so appealing. I don’t mean the censorship itself, but the sly, subtle representations of bubbling subconscious—who can resist?

One of the things I keep finding are scenes in which two cohabitating people argue about one of them creating too much clutter, not going out and working or seeing other people. There is an erotic communication behind each one. One partner is holed up in the house, drinking too much and making a mess, and demanding that the other partner must love him anyway. The other comes home to clean up the mess, marching around and demanding changes that will never happen. This is, I think, one way that repressed queer desire gets to say what it wants. It says, look at me and love me with all my filth. And it says, I can only love you with all the filth removed from view.

In the very charming 1961 film Goodbye Again, Ingrid Bergman plays a 40-year-old interior decorator in Paris whose boyfriend Yves Montand is constantly cancelling plans to chase after idiotic twentysomethings. So when the plainly insane 25-year-old Anthony Perkins appears and begins declaring his passionate (and clearly Oedipal) love for her, she puts up a heroic and hysterical effort to resist before being terrorized into giving it a go. As one might predict, he’s obsessive and perverse, and wants to make their affair as public as possible, in ways that expose her as just as queer as he is. One day she comes home to find him drunkenly napping and sulking, and threatens to break up with him, with bizarre results:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Here’s a very different version of the same scene, but doubled, in the disturbing 1963 film The Servant. James Fox plays a dissipated upper-class young man who hires an extremely traditional-seeming manservant, Dirk Bogarde, who subtly invades his private life and destroys his chances of marriage and success. Once he realizes he’s been duped, in a truly shocking scene, he finds he is too dependent on the servant to dispense with him. Instead, the two enter an intense contest of wills in which each man takes a turn accusing the other of being filthy as a way of asserting his dominance:

Click here to view the embedded video.

These scenes of filth and confrontation have more erotic content than a thousand frozen-mouthed Hays-Code kisses. By the time both of these films were made, sexual subjects—even queer ones—had already begun to be explored in mainstream cinema in fairly unambiguous ways. The plays Suddenly Last Summer and The Children’s Hour were made into films in 1959 and 1961, respectively, and both plots hinge entirely on gay sexual desire. There was a new explicitness available about queerness. But I think what I love especially about movies of the late 50′s and early 60′s is the persistence of queer content presented in Freudian semaphore.

What did average filmgoers see when they saw these movies? My mother was only a teenager when she saw The Servant, but she claims she developed a searingly painful erotic obsession with Dirk Bogarde, and, if one believes the hundreds of obsessive sexual fantasies typed into YouTube comments about Anthony Perkins in Goodbye Again, I think perhaps that film may have functioned similarly for others.

I don’t want to knock explicitness. I love explicitness. But there’s something about not saying what you mean that requires a sublimely creative—and perverted—imagination.

So, now you can rejoice in this.

Happy 2012.

Love,

Stella xxx

They jack us up on cheap champagne and make us feel that beauty and happiness are just one swipe of a credit card away.  And I love it!  If you spend, you get 25% off.  As one sales person said last night, make up is never on sale, so this is the moment you stock up for the year ahead.

I go every year with my friends Amy and Nancy.  We develop sophisticated strategies to stop our selves spending too much or ensure that we maximize the discounts and then promptly forget them.  We carefully evaluate the products we bought last year and seek out a more perfect purchase.  I’ve been a loyalist to Trish McEvoy mascara for about five years…but last night I got abducted into the Bobbi Brown camp…new mascara experience coming right up!  And a cream eyeshadow…here’s their recruiter.

We all adore the T. LeClerc guy and allow him to paint our pretty lips with new delicious colors.  Nancy gets a don’t-mess-with-me red.  Apparently, T. LeClerc no longer sells in D.C. so it’s our last fling with Joe.  We imagine the only other people buying the silvery encased products are elderly powdered ladies in New York.

Amy Austin, the fab publisher of the City Paper and un-friend of a certain NFL football team owner, chats with Blue Mercury owner Marla Beck.

And then we’re done.  We retreat to the Vietnamese restaurant next door for nourishment and the next best part of the night…the review of purchases, the analysis of strategy, the sharing of regrets, the comparison of free samples, and the inevitable start of the planning for next year.

Ah, Blue Mercury night, where the hope of a more beautiful life is never more than a year away.

When I was a teenager, I fantasized about being 35. I had all these things I wanted to do with my body and brain. I wanted to fuck around and not care what anyone thought, and I wanted to be at the height of my intellectual control. I wanted to have answers for questions, and for people to take me seriously when I delivered my thoughts. I planned to spend my 20′s doing what I had to in order to ensure that, by my mid-30′s, I was undeniably well-informed, sexually experienced, and pulling back against the overeager narcissism of youth. I wouldn’t need validation anymore because I would be a complete person without neediness. I would exude competence.

In my 20′s, I fantasized about being 45. When I met women in their mid-40′s, they seemed so blissful. They often acknowledged my emotional opacity and said that it was OK; eventually it will be much safer to have feelings. Someday it wouldn’t be impossible to recognize good people, and that I’d learn, over the coming decades, what it feels like to be treated with dignity and care. In my 40′s, I might lose some of my rough, prickly shell. I decided that in my 30′s, I’d do what I had to do to learn how to relate to other people with trust and honesty.

In my 30′s now, I envy my friends who are 55. They are empresses who tilt their heads and say, “I think that’s right,” in order to agree. They get sad, even in public, and instead of everyone telling them to toughen up, we all cry along. When a 55-year-old cries, she cries with authority. No one accuses a 50-something woman of being needy, or just wanting attention, or trying to be sexy, because a woman of that age simply has needs, demands attention, and, often by not trying at all, is sexy, in a way that does not require physical intercourse to prove. Best of all, they don’t require intercourse anymore.

That was the part of the Roseanne Barr article that made me so envious. I knew there would come a time in my life when sex stopped being appealing just because it was a big mysterious realm of private experience that I didn’t yet have. What I didn’t realize is that one can have satisfied all one’s curiosity and interest in physical sex, while still feeling a zombie-like compulsion to make it happen, or at least to be thinking of ways that one might potentially try to make it happen. Maybe I thought that it only happened to men. I still have at least 20 years ahead of me before I get any relief. Horrible.

On fulfilling the fantasies of my youth, I am doing a pretty good job. I’ve become almost exactly what I thought I would be when I was a teenager thinking about my mid-30′s self, and, in preparation for having a full emotional life in my 40′s, I’m experimenting with having feelings occasionally, and taking much better notes about interpersonal relationships and how they work. Maybe in ten years, I’ll be eyeing those 65-year-olds with squinty-eyed jealousy.