Holy Bullies and Headless Monsters: Know Your LGBT History

Friday, February 12, 2010

Know Your LGBT History - 3 Strikes

It's snowing in South Carolina and it's like when the USC football team makes it to a bowl game - it happens so rarely that when it does, folks down here tend to freak out.

Sorry, I couldn't resist.

And I will apologize again for today's segment of Know Your LGBT History. I know that I should be positive seeing that it's Black History Month and I was last week with Paris Is Burning.

But it's equally important to show the flipside in terms of the media images that lgbts of color have to deal with.

3 Strikes is a bad movie. And not in a Plan 9 From Outer Space good way. It's an insult all around to everyone involved. It tells the story of a young man who has just been released from prison for the second time. This means, according to the 3 strikes law, if he is arrested for another crime, he will be going to jail for a looong time. And as luck would have it, the young man who picks him up from prison gets caught in the middle of a police shootout.

Which means . . . never mind. This movie doesn't deserve an explanation. It insults everyone involved, especially the lgbt community in this scene which is supposed to be funny but reveals the mindset of the movie's writer about gay men. Apparently he felt that we are so sex crazed, we will rape someone in the hospital wearing a bloody diaper.

And it gets better. For a long time, Black Entertainment Television would show this movie. And that was funny because it was filled with so much profanity that the network would have to blot out the dialogue from a lot of scenes. If you hadn't watched this movie on video or at the movies, you wouldn't know what was going on.

The hateful hospital scene is seen here via a bad copy (sorry but I just don't have the stomach to put a good copy of this scene on my blog):

3 comments:

Kate said...: Ugh, I really hate it when people perpetuate ugly and false stereotypes and try to justify it by saying "it's just a joke". I think they need to rethink their definition of funny.; 5:25 PM
Bill S said...: That is just jaw-droppingly awful on so many levels.
Forget the simple fact the people like this character just don't exist-that no gay man would act like that. No HUMAN would act like this.
And it's also disgusting that it trivializes rape, something that's done routinely in prison movies.
I'd ask the idiots who made this movie to try a simple mental exericise: try changing the victim into a woman, and see if that scene would be as "funny".
For that matter: would a heterosexual woman be as turned on by the sight of a man in a blood-soaked diaper?
I'm glad I haven't seen this whole movie. And I'm really glad I didn't see it in a theatre where the audience laughs at the scene, not because it IS funny, but because they think it's supposed to be. That would have REALLY creeped me out.; 5:33 PM
Michelle said...: I agree totally. This was bad, very bad. The worst part is there are countless movies like this that BET loved to put in heavy rotation. One of many reasons I stopped watching BET. As Kate said many justify it by saying "it's just a joke". But it's more than a joke. It helps fuel ugly and false stereotypes in society especially the black comunity. Movies like this has people believing homosexual men are these aggressive predatory rapist out to violate all men by any means necesary. Lesbians all wanna be men, and bisexuals are confused and sex starved unable to have real emotions for someone of the same gender.; 6:41 AM