Two boys wearing makeup.

Have you seen the hysterical web series on thewb.com called A Boy Wearing Makeup?

If you’re not a fifteen-year-old girl or an industry queer like me, I will tell you that it stars a charming flamer named Mathieu who gives tips on, yes, how to wear makeup. Who doesn’t want advice on applying blush to best advantage or disguising dark undereye circles from a young guy wearing foundation? Well, I don’t, but that’s beside the point. My point is simply that thewb.com is savvy enough to realize that all fifteen-year-old girls are budding fag hags and, unless they’re being raised on a polygamist compound, those girls know that gender-bending of the sort embodied by Mathieu of the plucked eyebrows is hip and hot, very post-binary oppositions 21st-century yes-we-can, and kinda ’80s retro too.

I am afraid you will not be surprised to find that unhip-itude extends beyond polygamist compounds to the doldrums of mainstream America. We have only to look as far as Matt Allsup, a 13-year-old boy in that middlest of middles – Hamilton, Ohio – who has been harassed and intimidated by administrators at his middle school for wearing makeup – the kind of makeup that 13-year-old girls get away with wearing every day (unless their parents are as strict as mine, since it’s kind of Gothy and I wouldn’t have been allowed to wear black nail polish). And that’s the supercool thing about Matt’s mom – she is totally supportive of her son’s iconoclasm. She claims quite rightly that Matt is experiencing gender discrimination, that in being forbidden to wear makeup to school he is the victim of a sexual double standard. Isn't it ironic that the "Character Badge" that all Hamilton Middle School students must wear says "Do you value the uniqueness of others?"

Ironic, too, that the same culture that brings forth, on one hand, a boy whose makeup-wearing skills score him a web series deal from an entertainment mega-corporation (a fabulous platform from which to give us all lessons in a good smoky eye) also spawns a bunch of gender-conforming goose-steppers who do everything in their power to squash the boy who is brave enough to strike a pose for the freedom to rock his own smoky-eyed, black-lipsticked Robert Smith look amidst the cornfields of Ohio.

Hamilton Middle School administrators’ makeup-phobia is the Twinkie defense all over again – homophobia, pure and simple. A collective panic at the idea that a boy might be gay. But at the root of homophobia lurks the real villain: misogyny. The oh-my-god-this-boy-is-acting-like-a-girl panic, the reason why gay men and trans women are hated and bashed and murdered: they are voluntarily giving up their male supremacy and power, voluntarily assuming a subservient position, voluntarily becoming Like Women. And lots of good ol’ boys with a fragile hold on their own masculinity just can’t handle the gender anxiety.

We’ve forgotten (if we ever grasped it) Freud’s assertion that all neurosis is based on our ultimately futile attempts to be “real men” and “real women,” when no such essentialist identities exist. It’s all a spectrum…some women are more “masculine” than some men…lots of men are nurturing…blah blah blah. No. Instead, whole regiments of society get in line to police men (and 13-year-old boys) who won’t act like Men. It’s not a new concept; we all know why tomboys and women who renounce their femininity to become trans men have a slightly easier time of it (relatively speaking – I’m not forgetting Brandon Teena) – because they are gravitating toward the gender role with more power, and everyone can understand that, even if only on an unconscious level.

(I’m not even going to get into American macho culture’s ridiculous love affair with fake lesbianism. If I have to see one more video of college girls kissing each other while their boyfriends roar with drunken approval, I will have to head over to AfterEllen.com to cleanse my palate.)

“I’m not like most other people,” says young Matt Allsup. You go, boy!

California morning.

Early this morning I took my Lawless Hound on a walk past my Dream Home (the one in Los Feliz, not the one in the English countryside). It was another cloudless brilliant morning, a brisk, vivid 55 degrees. I pulled an orange off a branch that hung over a fence, and its scent on my fingers and when I punctured the rind with my fingernail was the sharp, sunny tang that is the very essence of optimism, the Platonic ideal of citrus. Nothing like those neutered plastic perfectly uniform orbs in the chilly produce section. This orange blushed tangerine on one side and faded to lemon on the other and just smelling its wild tartness made me salivate. I thought of Laura Ingalls Wilder and her sister Mary in their house on Plum Creek, when neighborly Mr. Edwards risked his life crossing a raging winter river to bring them Christmas trinkets and one orange each. Maybe this is what those prelapsarian oranges smelled like.

Before I got in my car to go to work, I looked up to the end of my street and saw, above the waving palms, the Griffith Observatory blindingly white in the intensely blue sky, beneath an insouciant little horsetail cloud.













I confess that I think of it as my own personal Observatory. I felt a protective panic on its behalf during the Griffith Park fire two springs ago – we stood in the street and watched the raging wall of flame leap high behind its domes.









The next morning I nearly cried with relief to see that it was still there. It’s my beacon – when I’ve been away from home, and I see it with its Art Deco pilasters there on its hillside getting closer, it gives me a thrill of happiness. I bet there are a lot of us who feel that way, people who can look up from their driveways and see it squatting placid and glorious just above us on the hill.

I was jealous to see news and pictures of the snowstorm that blanketed London earlier this week – I miss the muffled hush of snow, how it shuts adult life down, business and transportation, and gives people license to play. I miss the cold that makes being indoors and drinking tea by a fire so delicious. But on a morning like this, southern California has its charms.

Photo credits: Shutterberry; AP/Matt Sayles.

Some notes on how to make a short film, Part 1.

If you’re renting costumes from the wardrobe department of a major studio, take pictures of the costumes with your cameraphone so that, if they decide they’re too busy to accommodate your request, you can go to Jet Rag and find something pretty close. (If, however, you want them to rent you that indescribably divine handmade violet silk satin embroidered Marie Antoinette gown worth about $50,000, save your breath and go buy a cheap costume for fifty bucks.)

Work with the best, most experienced and professional people you can find. This is especially good if they’re your friends and they’re willing to work for free. Professionals are prepared to work hard. This applies to production assistants, too. Believe me, you don’t want your PAs flaking after the first day.

Find someone who’s willing to “rent” you their production insurance. You will save hundreds, if not thousands of dollars.

If one of your actors gets a paying gig and drops out the day before your shoot starts, you can actually find good actors on craigslist.

Get all your location releases signed before you shoot in those locations. I don’t care if it’s your best friend’s house. Make her sign.

Make sure you have hot coffee available the moment your crew arrives each morning.

Double-check that your DP transferred every single file from the P2 cards before said P2 cards get sent to the Middle East.