raymarsh-51084

I think that Cleve Jones is an interesting personality, but even a legendary personality like Harvey Milk only got about.2 hours and 8 minutes in the Oscar winning movie "Milk". Cleve Jones deserves a movie, but an 8 part miniseries is a bit too much. I really had to force myself to watch it, and didn't get past episode six until about six months later. It was especially difficult because the last thing I watched was Fellow Travelers. I read in the blurb that this represented gay liberation over the last so many decades, but gay liberation is far far more complex than this. The actors in this - very protracted - narrative act more out of necessity than heroism. This is a story that has been told to death. The facts are historically known by most gay people, and there is no real insight. No poignant dialogue. Only a narrow window into the gay condition. It is like someone who tells you that they were at 9/11, and then they spend most of the time telling you what they had for lunch on that day. Tedious. It could have been easily cut down to 3 episodes. If they made a movie about the Mattachine Society now, for instance, it would be more interesting. It is something that is still a mystery - even to most gay people.

Sleaze par excellence. Historical revisionism at its very worst. Human degradation and sexual exploitation have never been OK with me. I still watch the Simpsons because they still have a moral at the end. This series aggrandizes sexual exploitation. If it had any basis in reality, it would be different. When did Rock Hudson get around with a black protege? I have read his biography and looked through all the photos on Google and Bing, and can't find any evidence of that. Politically there is a vibe about the characters, as if they are post-feminist, and post black liberation (of the 1960s), and not really creatures of their time. Politically, it is interesting in the manner that it reverses the tables. When a straight guy is pursuaded to go to a sex party for gentlemen only, he is told that gay men pretend to be straight all the time; they are apparently what "makes the (Hollywood) world go round". Why shouldn't a straight guy oblige gays for once and pretend to be one of the other...?

Honestly, this is one of the nastiest, most biased depictions of a historic literary figure that I have seen. After the opening sequence, it starts in a semi-objective manner, but then becomes a cruel character assassination. One thing that particularly disturbed me was the claim that Truman Capote had been urging the authorities to end the stays of execution for Perry Smith and Richard Hickock (the two killers in the book, In Cold Blood). It implies that due to Capote's ambition for publication and success, he threw them under the bus. However, it fails to note that if not for Truman Capote, the pair would have been hung many years before. It is possible that Capote actually wanted the stays of execution to end because he wanted the death sentence to be commuted to a life sentence. Afterall, it was Truman Capote who organized a reputable lawyer to lodge their first appeal. This was a biased production. It made me wonder, who financed The Capote Tapes? I felt that it was homophobic in parts. As if a Gay kid in high school was being rounded on by a group of malicious students, bitter that he'd had the audacity to be a success. At the beginning there are a series of recorded voices commenting on Capote. Two remarks stood out to me.. A man claims: "He was a freak, an absolute freak". A woman's voice quips: "I haven't had a good laugh since he died." - The full series of comments are predominantly spiteful. Those quotes set the standard for what follows...