National Post Article: Ontario Superior Court Judge Refuses American Extradition Request For Abdullah Khadr.
Court frees Abdullah Khadr, turns down U.S. extradition request
Mike Cassese for National Post
Linda Nguyen, Postmedia News · Wednesday, Aug. 4, 2010
TORONTO — An Ontario court on Wednesday quashed a bid to extradite Abdullah Khadr to the U.S. on terrorism charges following a lengthy legal battle between the federal government and one of Canada’s most controversial families.
Mr. Khadr, 29, who has been held for the past five years at a Toronto detention centre, was immediately released following the decision by Superior Court Justice Christopher Speyer.
Mr. Khadr is the eldest son of Ahmed Said Khadr, an al-Qaeda financier who was killed by Pakistan forces in a shootout near the Afghanistan border in 2003. His family had immigrated to Canada in 1977.
“(I want to) try and get on with my life. I feel very happy,” Abdullah Khadr told reporters outside the downtown Toronto courthouse. “I always believed that it would happen one day, and thank God it happened.”
His release comes days before his younger brother, Omar, begins his military trial in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
Omar Khadr, 23, the only Canadian still held at the U.S. prison, has been detained there since 2002 following a firefight with U.S. forces in Afghanistan. He is charged with throwing a grenade that killed American medic Christopher Speer. He was 15 years old at the time.
From the start, Prime Minister Stephen Harper has refused to seek the repatriation of the terror suspect back to Canada but, notably, Canada’s legal system has sided many times with the Khadr family in its battles with the Canadian government.
In January, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled that Omar Khadr’s charter rights had been violated by Canadian officials who had questioned him at Guantanamo Bay in 2003 and 2004. Mr. Khadr had been exposed to sleep deprivation and denied his right to legal counsel by American interrogators.
Last month, a Federal Court judge ruled that the Conservative government had a week to come up with a list of “all untried remedies” that could help eradicate the breach of Mr. Khadr’s rights as a Canadian citizen. That victory was short-lived — a few weeks later, a Federal Appeals judge stayed the decision, arguing that the previous judge overstepped his boundaries and was essentially dictating the government foreign policy.
Meanwhile, the U.S. case against Abdullah Khadr was based on a number of statements he made to the FBI and RCMP about procuring weapons for al-Qaeda and allegedly being involved in an assassination plot against the prime minister of Pakistan. He said those confessions were made while he was detained and tortured in Pakistan in 2005.
During his extradition hearing last fall, Mr. Khadr told a Toronto court that authorities had also threatened violence against his family.
“If someone tells you, if you don’t tell us you are selling missiles to al-Qaeda, we are going to rape your sister, what would you say?” Mr. Khadr had asked, breaking down.
He told the court that he attended a camp in Afghanistan when he was 13 years old and learned how to use guns, explosives and rocket and grenade launchers. Mr. Khadr said these were not terrorism camps run by al-Qaeda but were part of “Muslim culture.” He denied that his father had any influence over his ideology.
Nathan Whitling, one of the Edmonton-based defence lawyers representing Mr. Khadr, said this victory may have been the best-case scenario possible for his client but the battle is far from finished.
“We don’t feel that it’s over,” he said. “We see it as one good step in the process. Obviously we’re pleased about it but we’ll keep fighting this thing.”
The Canadian government has been on the “wrong side” these past five years by “actively pursuing” the extradition of his client to the U.S., added Mr. Whitling.
He and his colleague Dennis Edney had argued that Canada would be supporting interrogation methods against international law if it granted the extradition request. They also argued that the information was given under extreme duress.
Ultimately, Justice Speyer’s ruling was based on how the U.S. detained and drew a confession out of Mr. Khadr, who to this day maintains his innocence.
Mr. Khadr was arrested in Pakistan in 2004 after the U.S. government issued a $500,000 US bounty for his capture. He was denied access to a lawyer for three months and held a total of 14 months in Pakistan without charges. During this time he was interrogated by Pakistani, Canadian and American officials.
Mr. Whitling said Mr. Khadr, fearing arrest by U.S. authorities, plans to stay in Canada.
In the meantime, he will enjoy the small pleasures in life. For his first meal outside of detention in five years, he ate an Asian stir-fry and drank a Pepsi.
“He’s getting married. He’s engaged,” said Mr. Whitling. “He just wants to settle down and live a quiet life.”
The federal government has 30 days to appeal the Ontario Superior Court ruling.
Carole Faindon, a spokeswoman for the Department of Justice, said it was too soon to say whether an appeal will be launched.
“We are reviewing the decision,” she said. “A decision on an appeal will be determined in due time.”
CNN Article: Gay Marriage Rights Battle In California Is Not Over! May Take Several Years To Reach The Supreme Court Of The United States.
- EDITION: INTERNATIONAL
Proposition 8: Long road to the Supreme Court
- Proposition 8 is California’s voter-backed ban on same-sex marriage
- Federal judge rules Prop 8 unconstitutional
- The case will undoubtedly end up up going to the 9th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals
Washington (CNN) — A federal judge in California ruled Wednesday that Proposition 8 — California’s voter-approved ban on same-sex marriage — is unconstitutional.
Q: What happens next?
A: The losing side hoped the judge would immediately issue a stay to stop the ruling from going into effect until appeals are filed. The judge did just that by granting an immediate stay on the ruling.
Supporters of the voter-approved referendum in particular were concerned that if they lost, same-sex marriages could be performed before the judge rules on the stay request, which could take several weeks.
The next step will be for the losing side to file a “merits” appeal with the 9th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals in San Francisco, asking it to essentially decide whether the judge’s ruling was proper. Both those for and those against Prop 8 will probably ask this court to fast-track the case, that it be heard on an expedited basis.
Lawyers will argue on the larger legal questions in front of the three judges on the court, and then a written ruling will be issued. The losing side at this stage can ask an “en banc” panel of 11 judges from the court to hear the case.
The appeals court has no deadline in which to decide the constitutional questions, so the waiting game could drag on for many months.
Q: What will be argued?
A: This is a federal appeal over the impact created by a state referendum.
At issue is whether it violates the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of “equal protection” and “due process.” Such individual protections have often been used in cases of civil rights, such as school desegregation and voting.
Those against Prop 8 will say that marriage is a fundamental state-sanctioned right and that same-sex couples are being discriminated against when laws deny them that right. Prop 8 proponents have said that state legislatures and voters have the right to amend a state constitution on defining marriage and that their wishes must be respected by the federal courts.
Q: How does it get to the Supreme Court?
A: After the 9th Circuit court rules, lawyers have the option of asking the Supreme Court to intervene, likely the next step instead of the larger “en banc” panel.
The nine justices on the Supreme Court, unlike lower courts, have the discretion to deny hearing the case. In fact, only about 1 percent of petitions for certiorari — which this appeal is labeled — are accepted by the court for argument.
If the case is accepted, as would be expected, both sides will file a series of written briefs, oral arguments would be held, and then a written ruling is issued. The high court usually releases its rulings by June of the annual term that begins in October, within a few months at most of hearing a case.
Q: How long will it take to get there, given that this is a landmark case?
A: Depending on how long it takes the appeals court to decide how quickly to hear the case and then to decide the constitutional questions, it could be a year or two before the case reaches the Supreme Court.
Q: How might some justices look at the case?
A: A key question for the court will be how it views — or how it believes the law views — homosexuality.
The issue could come down to whether homosexuality is considered a “status” or “conduct.”
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, in an unrelated high court ruling in June, offered a clue to how she might decide the question. When talking about laws affecting homosexual rights, Ginsburg said, “Our decisions have declined to distinguish between status and conduct in this context.”
What Ginsburg suggests is that homosexuality is a status, something courts have generally given greater legal protection, as an “identifiable class.” But placing homosexuality in the “conduct” category would suggest that being gay is, at least in part, a choice and perhaps provide less constitutional protection.
It is a fundamental, landmark question: Do civil rights laws and the broad constitutional protection apply in the same-sex marriage context?
Assuming the high court membership remains the same over the next few years, the vote of Justice Anthony Kennedy will be key. A moderate conservative, he is the “swing” vote on this court, whose views on hot-button cases often are in harmony with more liberal colleagues.
Predicting how the court will ultimately rule is often futile, especially since the court is about to get its fourth new member in the last five years.
Vancouver Sun Article: Proposition 8 Overturned Gays & Lesbians Can Legally Marry In California.
SAN FRANCISCO — A federal judge in San Francisco decided Wednesday that gays and lesbians have a constitutional right to marry, striking down Proposition 8, the voter approved ballot measure in California that banned same-sex unions.
U.S. District Chief Judge Vaughn R. Walker said Proposition 8, passed by voters in November 2008, violated the federal constitutional rights of gays and lesbians to marry the partners of their choice. His ruling is expected to be appealed to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals and then to the U.S. Supreme Court.
“Plaintiffs challenge Proposition 8 under the due process and equal protection clauses of the 14th Amendment,” the judge wrote. “Each challenge is independently meritorious, as Proposition 8 both unconstitutionally burdens the exercise of the fundamental right to marry and creates an irrational classification on the basis of sexual orientation.”
Vaughn added: “Plaintiffs seek to have the state recognize their committed relationships, and plaintiffs’ relationships are consistent with the core of the history, tradition and practice of marriage in the United States.”
Ultimately, the judge concluded that Proposition 8 “fails to advance any rational basis in singling out gay men and lesbians for denial of a marriage license. Indeed, the evidence shows Proposition 8 does nothing more than enshrine in the California Constitution the notion that opposite-sex couples are superior to same-sex couples. . . . Because Proposition 8 prevents California from fulfilling its constitutional obligation to provide marriages on an equal basis, the court concludes that Proposition 8 is unconstitutional.”
Walker, an appointee of President George H.W. Bush, heard 16 witnesses summoned by opponents of Proposition 8 and two called by proponents during a 2 1/2-week trial in January.
Walker’s historic ruling in Perry vs. Schwarzenegger relied heavily on the testimony he heard at trial. His ruling listed both factual findings and his conclusions about the law.
Voters approved the ban by a 52.3 per cent margin six months after the California Supreme Court ruled that same-sex marriage was permitted under the state Constitution.
The state high court later upheld Proposition 8 as a valid amendment to the state Constitution.
An estimated 18,000 same-sex couples married in California during the months that it was legal, and the state continues to recognize those marriages.
The federal challenge was filed on behalf of a gay couple in Southern California and a lesbian couple in Berkeley. They are being represented by former Solicitor General Ted Olson, a conservative, and noted litigator David Boies, who squared off against Olson in Bush vs. Gore.
A Los Angeles-based group formed to fight Proposition 8 has been financing the litigation.
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and Attorney General Jerry Brown refused to defend Proposition 8, prodding the sponsors of the initiative to hire a legal team experienced in U.S. Supreme Court litigation.
Backers of Proposition 8 contended that the legal burden was on the challengers to prove there was no rational justification for voting for the measure. They cited as rational a view that children fare best with both a father and a mother.
But defense witnesses conceded in cross-examination that studies show children reared from birth by same-sex couples fared as well as those born to opposite-sex parents and that marriage would benefit the families of gays and lesbians.
Hot Lesbian Couple Alert: Grammy Award Winner Tracy Chapman & Actress/Writer Guinevere Turner Are Dating!
According to the Contact Music, lesbian folk rock star Tracy Chapman and the actress/writer Guinevere Turner are dating. Chapman and Turner were spotted at Los Angeles Outfest film festival last month.
Although Tracy Chapman is still reticent about coming out, her lesbianism is not a secret. In fact, in the 1990s the novelist Alice Walker and Tracy Chapman had a passionate love affair.
Congratulations to the happy couple!
Link: http://www.contactmusic.com/news.nsf/story/chapman-dating-the-l-words-turner_1155852
Wall Street Journal Article: Can A Muslim Woman Be A Feminist, Believe In Islam, But Is Against Patriarchy & Male Domination?
Islamic Feminists Storm Some Barricades
Can pray-ins by Muslim women end segregation at U.S. mosques?
By EMILY ESFAHANI SMITH
Muslim feminists call it the “penalty box.” It’s the area of a mosque where women, segregated from the men, pray. In Islam, prayer is required five times a day and Muslims often pray in congregation at mosques. During these prayers, women usually are partitioned off in a separate room or behind a curtain, “like naughty children,” one Muslim woman tells me, while men pray in a grand main hall.
One Muslim, Fatima Thompson, describes the penalty box at her mosque in Maryland as an overheated, dark back room. Another Muslim woman, Asra Nomani, tells me that at a major Washington D.C. mosque, the female section was in a trailer, where the voice of the imam (the prayer leader) came from a crackling speaker. “It was so humiliating I never went back,” says Ms. Nomani, a former reporter for the Journal.
Now these Muslim feminists have had enough. Hoping to reform Islam by making it more women-friendly, Ms. Thompson—an American convert to Islam—has organized several “pray-ins” at mosques in the D.C. area. These include the Islamic Center of Washington and the Dar Al-Hijra Islamic Center in Falls Church, Va., a mosque attended by several of the 9/11 hijackers and the Fort Hood mass killer Maj. Nidal Hasan. Ms. Thompson’s next pray-in target is a mosque in Washington.
Like the civil rights activists of the 1960s, whose “sit-ins” were part of a movement that ended racial segregation, Ms. Thompson hopes her peaceful pray-ins will help initiate a movement that ends overt sexism in Islam, despite the conventional wisdom that regards Islam and feminism as anathema. Her efforts come at a time when, as of a 2001 study, 66% of American mosques segregate men from women during prayer, an increase of 14% from 1994.
During the pray-ins, Ms. Nomani, Ms. Thompson, and several other women walk through the front door of the mosque—many require women to enter through a side or back door—and into the main hall. They then seat themselves behind the rows of men to pray.
The Muslim men get rattled. Ms. Nomani remembers one bearded man who “furrow[ed] his brows and scream[ed]… ‘Sisters go over there!'”—indicating the dreaded penalty box. Ms. Nomani humorously refers to him as the mosque’s “bouncer.” At one pray-in, the women didn’t budge when they were asked to move, and the service began with them praying with the men.
Though neither Ms. Thompson nor Ms. Nomani has been arrested, say, for trespassing, Ms. Nomani—who has been fighting sexism at her mosque in West Virginia for seven years—says she has received several death threats. Such violence-oriented intolerance, which in the West has become the public image of Islam, seems irreconcilably at odds with the moderate feminism of the pray-in group.
While people like Ms. Nomani work for reform, other women question whether it is possible. Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Somali author of “Infidel” and a former-Muslim-turned-atheist, agrees with the Islamic feminists that a mosque is “an island of gender apartheid.” To her, however, such practices represent Islam’s essential sexism. Being a Muslim and a feminist, she told me, are inherently contradictory.
For her bold denunciations of Islam, Ms. Hirsi Ali lives under constant threats against her life by Muslim fanatics. But anyone who questions, even from within the faith, risks trouble, she says. “A single attempt to change things, to innovate, invites accusations of blasphemy” she notes, “because you’re considered to be someone putting [yourself] on Allah’s [God’s] throne.” Islam means submission. Muslims must submit to the Quran’s God, not change him.
Yet, nowhere in the Quran does it say that women and men should be segregated during prayer. The Hadith, a large body of holy Islamic texts chronicling the life and attributed sayings of the Prophet Muhammad, notes that for women at prayer, the “best rows are the last rows.” And even then, some scholars, like UCLA’s Islamic law expert Khaled Abou El Fadl, don’t see this as an admonition. After all, in the seventh century, at the Prophet’s mosque, women did not pray behind a partition. And today in Islam’s holiest spot, Mecca, women and men can pray side-by-side.
Still, there is an undeniable sexism that gnaws away at many Muslim communities—communities that center around the social space of the mosques. Whether the pray-in movement will encourage mosques to grant women more rights is yet to be determined. Until then, Ms. Thompson and Ms. Nomani are initiating a much-needed debate about the status of women in Islam.
Colorlines Article: Is The Lesbian Film The Kids Are All Right Racist & Sexist?
The Kids Are All Right, But Not the Queer Movement
by Daisy Hernandez ShareThis | Print | Comment (54View)
Sunday, July 25 2010, 11:30 AM EST Tags: Hollywood, LGBT, pop culture
Every once in awhile, a Hollywood movie hits such a perfect note of familiarity that you leave the theater feeling like you just watched a film about your white friends and it was funny, sweet–marvelous, even. And, as you’d expect, messed up on race. Not messed up in a Mel Gibson sort of way. It’s nothing outright hateful, but rather annoying and mundane, like when the white gay guy says his décor is, ya know, “Asiany,” and you debate whether to spill red wine on his new, white rug or give him an Edward Said book.
This is the charm of Lisa Cholodenko’s new summer hit, The Kids Are All Right. Her white characters are so familiar and even so likable that you want to believe all they need is a better reading list. If only race relations were so easy.
Ostensibly, The Kids Are All Right is about two lesbian moms and their teenage kids who want to meet their sperm donor dad. It’s an all-star cast with Julianne Moore playing Jules, the flaky, new age mom, opposite Annette Bening, who delightfully remade herself into the soft butch mom Nic. There’s Oscar buzz and critics are rightly praising Cholodenko (High Art, Laurel Canyon) for the film’s solid script and the actors for stellar performances. Salon’s Andrew O’Hehire declared that the movie “ranks with the most compelling portraits of an American marriage, regardless of sexuality, in film history.”
It’s true. This is a film about two married people who are bored by their middle age sex lives, worried about their son’s choice of friends, and still recounting with giggles how they first met while arguing about how much one of them is drinking. They’re complicated, self-involved and, in their best moments, genuinely loving.
From another perspective though, The Kids Are All Right is also a revealing portrait of where the gay movement has been headed for some time now: white suburbia, Mexican gardener included.
The film is set in Southern California, where Nic and Jules have a comfortable, three-bedroom home, arguments about composting, a glass (or three) of red wine with dinner, a daughter (Alice in Wonderland‘s Mia Wasikowska) and son (Josh Hutcherson) testing the limits of parental authority. They’re the all-American, white family next door.
The political reference point for their home life is not a group of pissed-off drag queens circa 1969. It’s a Mad Men-style 1950s nostalgia. Jules is the stay-at-home mom trying her hand at a landscaping business and feeling that her doctor wife doesn’t appreciate her. Nic is the breadwinner who has to have a drink when she gets home from work. The scenario is inviting, familiar, a storyline about American family life that we want to believe, gay or het.
Like cinematic white heteros and gays in San Francisco’s Castro district, Nic and Jules’ contact with people of darker hues is limited. There’s a black restaurant hostess (Yaya DaCosta, a runner up from America’s Next Top Model), a Mexican gardener (Joaquín Garrido, Like Water for Chocolate), and an Indian teenage love interest (Kunal Sharma, The Cheetah Girls). By the end of the film, the three people of color have been dumped, fired or left behind in confusion.
To be fair to Cholodenko, she was probably just following Hollywood’s race rules. The moment a main character is darker than white bread, the movie becomes about race and doesn’t appeal to a wider (read: white) audience.
But it’s also a portrait of the white gay movement, which has struggled with its race issues for some time now, most publicly after Prop. 8 passed in California and hysterical white gay boys blamed black voters for keeping them from the joys of registering at Tiffany’s. If that happened though it was largely because the movement has failed to build institutions where people of color, like those in The Kids Are All Right, play more than minor roles.
A few months ago, a friend recounted walking into a meeting with the directors of statewide LGBT organizations. It was a majority white room. That the convening looked more like a Tea Party gathering than a 2008 Vote Obama youth rally should have been on the top of the agenda. It wasn’t.
Part of the success of Cholodenko’s movie rests in that, intentioned or not, she’s rendered on the big screen the racial realities of this new gay world order. When Jules is struggling with guilt about what she’s doing outside her matrimonial bed, she thinks Luis, the Mexican gardener she’s hired, is smirking at her, which he is. With comedic self-righteousness, Jules points out that he blows his nose too often. “I have allergies,” Luis explains. Fumbling through her words, Jules accuses of him having a drug problem and fires him.
The audience laughs. I laughed. At Jules, at her hysterical reaction, at how uncomfortably true it is that behind the white lesbian niceties can sit the old racist stereotypes of a Gov. Jan Brewer.
It’s a small moment in the film but a reminder of how the gay world mimics the straight one, where economic power goes hand in hand with a racial hierarchy. Were Luis, the Mexican gardener, to get home, take off his overalls and turn into a flaming queen, it would be hard to argue convincingly that he and Jules have a political struggle in common these days. Not impossible, but certainly a stretch.
NY Magazine Article: Is James Franco The Gayest Heterosexual Movie Star Ever?
The James Franco Project
Movie star, conceptual artist, fiction writer, grad student, cipher—he’s turned a Hollywood career into an elaborate piece of performance art. But does it mean anything? A critical investigation, with bathroom break.
- By Sam Anderson
- Published Jul 25, 2010
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Illustration by Gluekit
(Photo: Andrew H. Walker/Getty Images)
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1. The Wink
“Franco is here. And he is seriously good looking, but very weird.”
“Weird how?”
—Maxie and Lulu, General Hospital, November 23, 2009
James Franco will not stop bouncing around. We’re standing on the sixth floor of a building at NYU, in the Department of Cinema Studies, outside a small theater. He’s wearing a standard grad-student uniform: washed-out jeans, charcoal sweater, gray sneakers, messy hair. His face—the face whose sculpted smoothness has won him countless film roles, and a Gucci endorsement, and daily floods of heartsick prose poetry on Internet comment boards—has been abducted by a mildly disturbing mustache. (He had to grow it for a role, he says.) We’ve just finished listening to a lecture by the performance artist Marina Abramovic—a talk Franco introduced with a charming but rambling overview of Abramovic’s career: the time she screamed herself hoarse, the time she took medication to give herself seizures, the time she cut her own hand with a knife, the time she ate an entire raw onion. It’s unclear whether people have come tonight to see Abramovic or Franco or just the symbiotic fusion of the two—this rare public marriage of Hollywood and art-world stars.
The crowd has dispersed now, and Franco is out here in the lobby bouncing around, weirdly, like a boxer before a fight, hopping back and forth, telling me about how stressed he is. He’s just flown back from Berlin this afternoon, he says, and he has a 35-page paper due tomorrow. Next weekend he has to shoot a student film, because in two weeks he’ll be flying out to Salt Lake City to start acting in a movie called 127 Hours, director Danny Boyle’s follow-up to Slumdog Millionaire, in which Franco will play a hiker who gets pinned by a boulder and has to amputate his own arm. Revisions are due soon on his book of short stories, which will be published in October by Scribner. He’s trying to nail down the details of an art show that will be based, somehow, on his recent performance on the soap opera General Hospital. Also, he has class every day, which—since he’s enrolled in four graduate programs at once—requires commuting among Brooklyn, Greenwich Village, Morningside Heights, and occasionally North Carolina. He looks exhausted; it occurs to me that maybe he’s bouncing around to keep himself awake.
After a few minutes, Franco apologizes for his hopping and says he really just desperately needs to urinate. He keeps talking about his work as we walk down the hall—most of his student films, he tells me, have been adaptations of poems—and then he talks about it some more as he enters the bathroom. His voice takes on the ring of institutional porcelain and tile. His next film, he says, will be based on Spencer Reece’s poem “The Clerk’s Tale,” a dramatic monologue by a man who works in a mall. Franco is still talking about all of this as he starts to urinate, matter-of-factly, into a urinal—a process that goes on for an extremely long time. (He’s a compulsive drinker of Starbucks coffee, and Abramovic talked for well over an hour.) He’ll be filming at an actual mall in Queens next weekend, he says, still urinating, and the movie will star the performance artist John Kelly, who’s best known for appearing onstage, in drag, as Joni Mitchell. As I stand behind Franco, here in the tiny bathroom, taking notes, I feel a strange little thrill of low-grade intimacy—equal parts discomfort, amusement, affection, and an excitement whose source I can’t quite trace.
Franco washes his hands, and we head back out to the lobby, where he’s met by a small group that’s been milling around—it’s hard to tell if it’s an entourage or just a few lingering friends and classmates, a Hollywood thing or a student thing. Before he turns to walk away, Franco does something surprising: He winks at me. I have no idea what this is supposed to mean. As he and Abramovic walk off together toward the elevators, my mind starts to run through all the possible interpretations. Was it a cheesy Hollywood-schmoozer wink, meant to charm and titillate me—the equivalent of a personalized James Franco autograph on our conversation? Or was it sincere, a gesture of goodwill and openhearted, rakish, devil-may-care bonhomie? (Is a sincere wink even possible, here in the cinema-studies department at NYU, in the year 2010?) Was it ironic—a wink set in quotation marks? Was he making fun of me, and of himself, and of the whole vexed transaction of celebrity journalism? Was he flirting with me, or metaflirting—making a sly reference to all the gay rumors swirling around him, and to our strange homosocial trip to the bathroom together?
In the hours after our brief meeting, and then in the months that followed, I would come to believe that everything important about Franco and his career could be derived from that mystifying wink. The only problem was that I had no idea, really none at all, what he meant by it.
2. The Everything-ist
“Believe what you want. But here’s a clue. The secret to life: Anyone can die at any time.”
“So what do we do about it?”
“Amuse ourselves. Don’t live by rules or boundaries. And take what you want, when you want.”
—Franco and Maxie, General Hospital, November 24, 2009
Not so long ago, James Franco’s life and career were fairly normal. He grew up in Palo Alto, California, where his parents had met as Stanford students. Young James was, at his father’s urging, a math whiz—he even got an internship at Lockheed Martin. As a teenager, he rebelled, got in trouble with the law (drinking, shoplifting, graffiti), and eventually migrated toward the arts. His hero was Faulkner. He fell in love with acting when he played the lead in a couple of dark and heavy high-school plays. After freshman year, he dropped out of UCLA, very much against his parents’ wishes, to try to make a career of it. He was good, lucky, and driven, and within a couple of years, he got his first big break: Judd Apatow cast him in what would become the cult TV series Freaks and Geeks. When the series was canceled after just a season, Franco landed the lead in the TNT biopic James Dean. He played the part with a slumping intensity that seemed like a reasonable replication of the real thing—or at least much closer than anyone had a right to expect from a TNT biopic—and the performance won a Golden Globe. Soon after, he was cast as Robert De Niro’s drug-addicted son in the film City by the Sea. That same year, he entered mainstream consciousness as Peter Parker’s best friend in Spider-Man.
Franco had become, in other words, a working Hollywood actor. An unusual actor—he overprepared for minor roles, read Dostoyevsky and Proust between takes, and occasionally drove colleagues crazy with his intensity—but still identifiably an actor, with an actor’s career. As he climbed toward leading-man status, however, Franco had a crisis of faith. He found himself cast in a string of mediocre films—Annapolis, Flyboys, Tristan + Isolde—most of which bombed. He felt like he was funneling all his effort into glossy, big-budget entertainment over which he had no control, and of which he wasn’t proud.
At age 28, ten years after dropping out, Franco decided to go back to college. He enrolled in a couple of UCLA extension courses (literature, creative writing) and found them so magically satisfying—so safe and pure compared with the world of acting—that he threw himself back into his education with crazy abandon. He persuaded his advisers to let him exceed the maximum course load, then proceeded to take 62 credits a quarter, roughly three times the normal limit. When he had to work—to fly to San Francisco, for instance, to film Milk—he’d ask classmates to record lectures for him, then listen to them at night in his trailer. He graduated in two years with a degree in English and a GPA over 3.5. He wrote a novel as his honors thesis.
It was interesting timing. As soon as Franco decided his Hollywood career wasn’t enough, his Hollywood career exploded—which meant that his intellectual pursuits got picked up on the radar of the A-list Hollywood publicity machine. Which was, of course, baffled by all of it. Plenty of actors dabble in side projects—rock bands, horse racing, college, veganism—but none of them, and maybe no one else in the history of anything, anywhere, seems to approach extracurricular activities with the ferocity of Franco.
Take, for instance, graduate school. As soon as Franco finished at UCLA, he moved to New York and enrolled in four of them: NYU for filmmaking, Columbia for fiction writing, Brooklyn College for fiction writing, and—just for good measure—a low-residency poetry program at Warren Wilson College in North Carolina. This fall, at 32, before he’s even done with all of these, he’ll be starting at Yale, for a Ph.D. in English, and also at the Rhode Island School of Design. After which, obviously, he will become president of the United Nations, train a flock of African gray parrots to perform free colonoscopies in the developing world, and launch himself into space in order to explain the human heart to aliens living at the pulsing core of interstellar quasars.
Franco says all of his pursuits are possible, at least in part, because he’s cut down on his acting, but he’s still doing plenty of that. In the next year or so, he’ll be appearing in the films Eat, Pray, Love (as Julia Roberts’s boyfriend), Howl (as Allen Ginsberg), 127 Hours (as the one-armed hiker), Your Highness (a medieval comedy), William Vincent (an indie film by one of his NYU professors), Maladies (put out by his own production company), and Rise of the Apes (a prequel to Planet of the Apes). And of course there’s his epically weird stint on General Hospital—the crown jewel in the current science project of his career.
All of which raises a small army of questions:
(1) Can James Franco possibly be for real?
(2) If he is, then—just logistically—how is all this possible?
(3) And perhaps the biggest mystery of all: Why is Franco doing it? Are his motives honest or dishonest? Neurotic or healthy? Arrogant or humble? Ironic or sincere? Naïve or sophisticated? Should we reward him with our attention or punish him with our contempt? Is he genuinely trying to improve himself or is he just messing with us—using celebrity itself as the raw material for some kind of public prank?
3. Logistics
“You are so full of crap.”
“You keep saying that.”
—Maxie and Franco, General Hospital, November 24, 2009
“I’m not like everyone else—remember that.”
—Franco, General Hospital, December 11, 2009
It’s hard not to be a little skeptical. Anyone who’s ever been to grad school will tell you that a single high-level program is pretty much crippling. Not to mention that topflight programs like Yale’s are designed to “professionalize” students, shearing away all of their outside interests and hobbies. Some professors frown on students having relationships, much less other careers—much less twelve of them. So while Franco’s adventure in overeducation might seem, from a distance, admirable, or at least lovably naïve, it also seems basically impossible. This skepticism was bolstered last year when a photo circulated online showing Franco sitting in class at Columbia, his head tilted back, dead asleep. The photo’s unspoken message was that the cynics were probably right: Franco’s pretty smile had given him a free pass to cultural realms the rest of us have to work our whole lumpy-faced lives just to get an outside shot at. He wasn’t so much attending grad school as he was endorsing it: lending these programs his celebrity in exchange for easy intellectual cred.
Franco’s professors, classmates, and colleagues insist, however, that this is not the case. According to everyone I spoke with, Franco has an unusually high metabolism for productivity. He seems to suffer, or to benefit, from the opposite of ADHD: a superhuman ability to focus that allows him to shuttle quickly between projects and to read happily in the midst of chaos. He hates wasting time—a category that includes, for him, sleeping. (He’ll get a few hours a night, then survive on catnaps, which he can fall into at any second, sometimes even in the middle of a conversation.) He doesn’t drink or smoke or—despite his convincingness in Pineapple Express—do drugs. He’s engineered his life so he can spend all his time either making or learning about art. When I asked people if Franco actually does all of his own homework, some of them literally laughed right out loud at me, because apparently homework is all James Franco ever really wants to do. The photo of him sleeping in class, according to his assistant, wasn’t even from one of his classes: It was an extra lecture he was sitting in on, after a full day of work and school, because he wanted to hear the speaker.
Vince Jolivette, Franco’s roommate and general right-hand man (he runs Franco’s production company and plays bit parts in many of his films), met Franco in acting class in 1996. “Our teacher made us rehearse at least once a day outside of class,” he told me. “James would get eight or nine rehearsals. Everyone else would do, at most, one. If we didn’t rehearse, or if I had to cancel, he’d be pissed.”
John Tintori, chair of NYU’s filmmaking program, told me that Franco convinced him of his sincerity in the entrance interview. “He was an hour early. He just sat outside my office waiting. In the interview, the two faculty members who were with me were skeptical and really held his feet to the fire. He said, ‘I am not going to be the guy who’s not pulling his weight.’ And he isn’t. In fact, he’s loading up and doing extra credit. Normally, we’re a three-year program. My guess is he’ll probably finish in two and a half years. A few months ago, he said, ‘I really like it here. Is it okay, after I finish all my requirements—can I keep taking classes?’ I’m looking into that, because I don’t know if it’s allowed.”
According to his mother, Betsy, Franco has been this way since he was born. In kindergarten, he wouldn’t just build regular little block towers—he’d build structures that used every single block in the playroom. At night, he would organize his Star Wars toys before he slept. When Franco was 4 years old, a friend of the family died. Betsy gave him the standard Mortality Talk: no longer with us, just a part of life—yes, but hopefully not for a very long time. Little James burst into tears. He was inconsolable. Eventually, he managed to choke out, between sobs, “But I don’t want to die! I have so much to do!”
This is, no doubt, mildly insane, even if it’s a form of insanity many of us might want to have.
One of Franco’s most serious productivity advantages is his personal assistant, Dana Morgan. “I tease him when people say, ‘How do you do it?’ ” she tells me. “ ‘You don’t! You do all the things they know about, but you don’t do the normal human-being things.’ ”
Morgan, a former UCLA classmate of Franco’s, manages his minute-to-minute existence: makes sure he wakes up, gets dressed, eats. “I guarantee you he would not eat unless I fed him,” she says. “He’ll do the hand-to-mouth part, but I definitely bring it to his hands. It’s not that he’s helpless. It’s just that he would not take the time to find food. He has the luxury of not having to worry about it.”
Despite the hired help, Morgan tells me, Franco’s hyperproductive life is not always easy. “He definitely gets overwhelmed at times. Sometimes we’ll look at each other, and it’s been 36 hours since either of us has closed our eyes, and he’s switched from decaf to regular, and we’re on a train or a plane or a car and he’ll go, ‘What am I doing? What’s going on?’ But then it’s like: ‘Well, we’re making things happen the way you want.’ ”
4. The After-Party
“The camera never lies. Except it always does.”
—Franco, General Hospital, July 7, 2010
James Franco’s homework has had an incredible year. Short stories he worked on at Columbia and Brooklyn College were published in Esquire and McSweeney’s. His NYU student films—including the artsy adaptations of poetry he was telling me about in the bathroom—graced all the major film festivals. His documentary Saturday Night, which began life as a seven-minute NYU assignment, blossomed—thanks to unprecedented behind-the-scenes access to SNL (a show Franco has hosted twice)—into a full-length feature.
The next time I see Franco is at the Tribeca Film Festival, at an after-party for Saturday Night. The party is sponsored by Polaroid, which is using the occasion to promote its new Polaroid 300 camera so aggressively it feels almost like a satire of publicity: Everyone is taking photos, or photos of photos, or video of photographers taking photos of photos. It’s like Andy Warhol has thrown a surprise party for a Don DeLillo novel.
Over the course of the party, Franco stands mainly right near the front door, creating a bulge of admirers that makes it hard to get in and out of the building. He looks, tonight, not like a grad student but like a swashbuckling young Hollywood leading man: He’s wearing jeans and a brown leather jacket; his sketchy mustache has been normalized by the addition of a goatee; his hair is curly and wild. His job here at the party seems to be to make chitchat—to spread the limited resource of his attention affably across hundreds of targets, never locking in for more than a few minutes at a time, but also never making anyone feel slighted.
Partygoers approach and compliment him, exchange pleasantries with him, take cell-phone pictures of him. He talks to his agent, to his NYU classmates, to the TV critic of the New York Post. Midway through the party, I manage to break into the golden orb of Franco’s attentional sphere. We talk about his latest projects, and he can’t resist making a prediction.
“The new critique you’re gonna start hearing about James Franco,” says James Franco, “is ‘He’s spreading himself too thin.’ ”
I tell him I’ve already heard that critique many times.
“But what does that even mean?” he asks. He seems impatient, genuinely baffled. “Spreading himself too thin?”
Well, I say, isn’t it a reasonable concern? How many targets can one person’s brain realistically hit with any kind of accuracy?
“If the work is good,” Franco says, “what does it matter? I’m doing it because I love it. Why not do as many things I love as I can? As long as the work is good.”
Soon he gets whisked away to a back room to have his portrait taken, in Polaroids, over and over by someone a company rep keeps calling “a real artist.” Franco sits in a kind of Thinker pose, with his face resting on the tripod of his fingers. At the end of the session, the real artist tapes all of his portraits together into one big collage of fractured Franco.
5. The Adolescent
“The best art is understood by the fewest number of people.”
“Okay. Well, you’re incredibly popular. Does that mean you’re not good?”
“I’m good.”
—Franco and Maxie, General Hospital, November 23, 2009
The critic Kenneth Tynan once wrote about Orson Welles, history’s archetypal writer-actor-director, “Orson is the man who tried it all: And every time he tried a medium, it capitulated.” The same cannot be said, as of yet, for Franco. Artistic media don’t seem to capitulate to him. They struggle against him, making him earn every modest inch of success. Watching that struggle is fascinating and a big part of Franco’s appeal: He’s not a savant or an obvious genius—he’s someone of mortal abilities who seems to be working immortally hard. Outside of acting—at which he is, by all accounts, very good and sometimes excellent—Franco’s work gives off a student-y vibe. It exudes effort. His directing is daring but often heavy-handed. His fiction reads like promising work from a writing seminar—not a student whose success you’d guarantee but someone you could see eventually getting there. (When Franco’s story “Just Before the Black” was published in Esquire, it set off a huge online hullabaloo of negativity. Salon called it a “crush killer.” One writer tweeted that “Franco makes Ethan Hawke seem like Herman Melville.”) Still, Franco grades well on a curve. He’s an excellent writer, for an actor. He’s brilliant, for a heartthrob. But he has yet to produce art that’s good enough to break the huge gravitational pull of his fame and fly off on its own merits.
Franco’s main artistic obsession—the subject that echoes across all of his various media—is adolescence. This seems appropriate on several levels. His own adolescence was unusually formative: It turned him from an obedient young math prodigy into a turbocharged art fanatic. His defining characteristic, as an actor, is an engaging restlessness—adolescence personified. In fact, you could say that Franco’s entire career is suspended, right now, in a kind of artistic adolescence. We’re watching him transition, a little awkwardly, from one creature (the Hollywood-dependent star) to another (the self-actualized, multiplatform artist). Like real adolescence, it’s a propulsive phase in which energy exceeds control. It’s about extremes—the hysteria to distinguish oneself, to break the rules, to leap into the world and do impossible things. Franco is developing all kinds of new strengths, but at the cost of some of his dignity: His intellectual skin is a little spotty, his artistic legs are suddenly too long for the rest of his body.
It’s the kind of ragged transition that most actors pay good money to have smoothed over by publicity teams. Yet Franco is making a spectacle of it. Which is, in a way, brave. One of the central points of Franco’s art and career, as I read them, is that adolescence isn’t something we should look away from, a shameful churning of dirty hormones. It’s the crucible of our identity, the answer to everything that comes later, and we need to look long and hard at it, no matter how gross or painful it might sometimes feel.
6. A Queer Career
“You’re priceless. I should take you to my apartment and put you on my mantel—you can be your own little work of art.”
“Oh, yeah, you think people would pay money for me?”
“Oh, yeah, Mr. Franco. I know quite a few women who would be happy to keep you occupied.”
“For a while. And then what?”
—Maxie and Franco, General Hospital, November 24, 2009
One defining characteristic of adolescence is, of course, our emergence into the world as sexual beings. In this sense, too, Franco seems to be living an extended public adolescence. Many people are obsessed—and Franco has given them ample reason to be—with the question of whether he’s gay or straight. For a Hollywood heartthrob, he’s been unusually drawn to gay or bisexual roles: Allen Ginsberg, James Dean, Harvey Milk’s long-term boyfriend Scott Smith. Even seemingly straight roles—e.g., the pot dealer in Pineapple Express—end up bursting, in Franco’s hands, with homoerotic energy.
Although Franco has been silent on this subject, he seems to enjoy stoking the controversy. His art, across the spectrum, revels in gay culture. His student film The Feast of Stephen involves an extended fantasy scene in which a group of teenage boys gang-rape another boy—who then smiles meaningfully at the camera as the screen goes dark. (An intimate screening of the film was sponsored, last summer, by Butt magazine.) The narrator of Franco’s Esquire short story asks a friend: “Don’t you ever get jealous of those girls in pornos that get to be on their knees in the middle of all those dicks?” Franco researched his role for the 2002 film Sonny by hanging out at gay strip clubs in New Orleans, and even tagged along with a stripper as he serviced a male client in a hotel room. In a guest spot on 30 Rock, he played a version of himself whose sexual obsession with a Japanese body pillow is an open public secret—a perfect allegory for his alleged homosexuality.
When Franco mentioned to me, via e-mail, that he was leaning toward going to Yale for his Ph.D., the faculty member he singled out was Michael Warner. Warner happens to be one of the pioneers of queer theory, a school of thought born in the early nineties (just as Franco was hitting adolescence) that argues that sexuality is not a trivial, personal matter but fundamental to how we all experience the world. “Queer,” in this sense, transcends the simplistic binary of gay versus straight. As Warner puts it in his canonical anthology Fear of a Queer Planet, queer defines itself “against the normal rather than the heterosexual.” Thinking about sexuality—particularly exposing the assumptions embedded in heteronormative culture—is a form of radical social critique, a way to challenge arbitrary boundaries and institutions.
Which is, of course, basically a description of Franco’s current career: He’s systematically challenging mass-cultural norms. Franco, you might say, is queering celebrity: erasing the border not just between gay and straight but between actor and artist, heartthrob and intellectual, junk TV and art museum. His obvious relish for gay roles challenges the default heterosexuality of Hollywood leading men like Clooney or Pitt. He seems more interested in fluidity, in every sense, than in a fixed identity. As a commenter on the website Queerty put it: “He’s the World’s Gayest Heterosexual!” But he’s also the world’s most heterosexual gay, the world’s highest lowbrow, and the world’s most ironic earnest guy. It is also possible that he’s just engaged in the world’s most public, and confused, coming-out process.
Given all of this, “James Franco’s girlfriend” would seem to be a fraught position. And yet Ahna O’Reilly seems not to be bothered. “You do a movie where you’re gay,” she says, “or, in James’s case, more than one, it’s going to happen. I know that a lot of people wish he were gay, or think I’m not his real girlfriend. But there’s nothing you can do about that.”
O’Reilly and Franco met five years ago, just before his career took its radical turn. She was an acting student at Playhouse West, the school Franco had studied at years before. He was an increasingly famous actor on the brink of a career crisis. They discovered that they’d both grown up in Palo Alto, ten minutes away from each other, and that their mothers used to chat at the public pool. They’ve been together ever since, through all the rumors, and the schoolwork, and the move to New York. It seems emblematic that Ahna, who lives in L.A., is speaking to me from Franco’s apartment in New York—she’s here to film a movie—while Franco is in L.A. filming new episodes of General Hospital.
“The choice to go back to school really changed everything,” O’Reilly remembers. “He was reading all the time and writing papers all the time—just constant schoolwork. He was so, so happy. And it was funny how it worked: Once he gave up trying to control his acting career, everything kind of came his way. Pineapple Express came along, and then Milk.”
I tell O’Reilly that I wonder sometimes if Franco’s entire life—the sexual play, the grad school, even my article—is a work of performance art. “No,” she says. “But if someone were doing a performance piece like that, it would be him.”
7. Meta/Earnest
“I wonder if his ***sensarity*** is real or fake?”
—YouTube comment on General Hospital Franco clip
“Since when is performance art a crime?”
—Franco, General Hospital, January 8, 2010
As Franco adds layer upon layer, wink upon wink—as he slides further along the continuum from Gyllenhaal to Warhol—his entire career is beginning to look less like an actual career than like some kind of gonzo performance piece: a high-concept parody of cultural ambition. He’s become a node of pop-cultural curiosity in roughly the same universe as Lady Gaga. Blogs report Franco’s texting habits at parties and spread bizarre secondhand rumors about his film shoots. (“Franco is in a wheelchair, with a blanket over his legs like FDR, and a camcorder in his hand …”) There are YouTube tributes that splice together all his onscreen kisses, a Tumblr account that publishes daily pictures of him, and even an online interactive James Franco dress-up doll. It’s hard to imagine this is all accidental: It seems like the work of a virtuoso public-image artist. And yet Franco plays the role, fairly convincingly, of the earnest boy just following his interests. (It’s worth noting that, although the web is obsessed with him, he maintains zero web presence—no Twitter account, no blog.) In interviews he’s charming and affable but rarely says anything provocative. His work itself, his career choices, are more interesting than his words.
My favorite Franco art project, the one that best combines all of his interests (high/low, gay/straight, earnest/ironic) is his work on General Hospital. It started as a joke between Franco and his artist friend Carter, who were discussing a movie in which Franco would play a former soap star. It occurred to them that it would be funny if Franco actually showed up, sometime, on a real soap opera. This fit nicely into a constellation of ideas Franco had already been thinking about: the difference between high art and mass art, the space between performance and real life, the vagaries of taste. So Franco called General Hospital, one of TV’s most popular and longest-running soap operas. The result is a small, double-edged pop-culture masterpiece—a black hole of publicity in which everything works both within the frame of the show and as a commentary on Franco’s career.
Franco’s General Hospital character is a transparent soap-world portrait of Franco himself: a dashing multimedia artist (graffiti, photography, performance art) named “Franco” who sweeps into town and fascinates, angers, seduces, and generally confuses everyone around him. Like Franco, “Franco” is obsessed with art that crosses over into reality: He re-creates, in galleries, actual crime scenes—until eventually the people of Port Charles come to suspect that he might be a murderer himself.
Franco plays “Franco” with deliciously campy intensity. He unleashes the full soap-opera repertoire: brooding stares, sudden outbursts, feverish make-out sessions, deadpan quips. (“Keep the change,” he says, flipping a quarter onto a corpse.) His story arc will culminate, this month, in a very special episode set in the Museum of Contemporary Art in L.A., at which “Franco” will stage an art show that doubles as some kind of explosive evil-genius doomsday scenario. Franco himself, the real human, is also going to have a show at MoCA this summer based on his experience on General Hospital. (He brought a camera crew along to film the filming of the episodes.) In December, Franco wrote an article in The Wall Street Journal in which he declared that he intends his General Hospital cameo to be seen as performance art. (“My hope was for people to ask themselves if soap operas are really that far from entertainment that is considered critically legitimate.”) The article was accompanied, online, by a video conversation between Franco and Abramovic, held in her apartment, during which she had him put on a white lab coat, peel almonds, and eat a dessert ball wrapped in a sheet of gold.
For an earnest guy, Franco has always been ragingly addicted to meta. He loves to play James Franco—not just in General Hospital (sort of), but in Knocked Up, 30 Rock, and a series of short videos he’s made for the website Funny or Die (e.g., “Acting With James Franco,” in which he instructs his younger brother Dave in the rudiments of the profession). The more Franco self-dramatizes like this, and the more we become accustomed to it, the more he’s actually James Franco playing James Franco playing James Franco—a mise en abyme of artsy pomo heartthrob.
8. The Opening
“Art’s like a mirror. It’s pretty clear what you see.”
—Franco, General Hospital, November 23, 2009
“Don’t be afraid. You and I are … intimates. Say what you feel.”
—Franco, General Hospital, July 6, 2010
The last time I see James Franco is at the opening of his first solo art show, at the Clocktower Gallery in downtown New York. The Clocktower is a nonprofit gallery that’s prestigious but not at all flashy; it’s hidden on the thirteenth floor of an enormously bland municipal building. When I enter, I’m pulled aside by Alanna Heiss, the curator of the show, who tells me that this opening is not about a red carpet, or creating buzz, or making money. She chose Franco, she says, not for his celebrity but because he has a special vision—an understanding, above all, of the connectivity among media—that she thinks is going to influence the way future generations look at art. But there’s no denying that Franco’s celebrity will be an incredible draw—it may as well be one of the pieces in the show.
The show is called “The Dangerous Book Four Boys,” a corruption of the book title The Dangerous Book for Boys, which is a tongue-in-cheek primer of young masculinity. (Franco has torn out, doodled on, and framed pages of that book all over the gallery.) One of its first rooms features a large pile of junk heaped on the floor: T-shirts, books, VHS tapes, lunch boxes. It looks like the bedroom of a 12-year-old hoarder. (Heiss tells me that it’s all authentic Franco junk, shipped out from his childhood room in California.) The rest of the show feels similarly haphazard. It’s a hodgepodge of media: film, doodles, wooden structures, photos. The uniting theme seems to be the messy transition from boyhood to adolescence, with special emphasis on the messiest markers of that shift—sex and violence. The wall text says it was made possible, in part, by funding from Gucci. (Franco is the face of the company’s men’s fragrance.)
Much of the art is violent or explicitly obscene. A video called Masculinity and Me intersperses lurid monologues about rape and murder and diarrhea with close-up shots of a urinating penis and a defecating anus. (Many of the speeches sound like comments from an undergrad queer-theory seminar: “Man and woman are impossible ideals,” one character says. “We’re all gender-fucked—we’re all something in between, floating like angels.”) Another short film, Dicknose in Paris, features Franco as the title character, with a big floppy prosthetic penis—complete with dangling testicles and a bush of pubic hair—hanging down from the middle of his face. (When Dicknose walks the streets of Paris, he has to cover his face with a sweatshirt.) Franco often wears masks in his work: a wolf, a clown, a freakish bald-headed man-monster. It comes off as a rebuke to his own outlandishly pretty face: the face that has won him so much in the world (including, at least in part, this art show)—but also the face that stands between him and serious artistic credibility.
The show’s most prominent piece is a big barnlike structure made of plywood, the kind of playhouse a perfect father might build for his 9-year-old son. I step inside to find a small room lined with plywood benches. It’s sweltering. On the far wall, a video is being projected: footage of a plywood house burning to the ground. One of the other visitors walks out, and suddenly there are only two of us, here in the house that contains an image of its own destruction, and the other person is James Franco.
I stand very still, like a hiker who’s just seen a bear. Franco’s publicist has recently informed me that—after all these months of e-mailing (he always responds immediately, and likes to sign off with “Peace”) and brief conversations—Franco and I are no longer allowed to talk. He’s signed an exclusivity agreement with another magazine. Under no circumstances am I to speak to him, I’m told, not even to say hello. I can see him now in my peripheral vision: He looks not like a grad student or a hipster but like an international golden boy, a corporate spokesman—unmasked and cleanly shaven, dressed in a gray Gucci suit and pointy black Gucci shoes. His hair is sculptural, bushy but managed. Surely, I think, if someone sees us together, I will be thrown out. On the opposite wall, the flames have stripped the house to its frame, reducing it to some kind of glowing black non-substance, half-wood, half-ash.
A few seconds pass.
“Hi, Sam,” James Franco says.
I feel the same low-grade thrill of intimacy I felt at our first meeting in the NYU bathroom—this time spiced with a new kind of danger.
“I think we’re not supposed to be talking,” I say.
“Why, what happened?” he says. “Did somebody call you? Did you get a talking to?”
I tell him that his inner circle has done everything short of surrounding him with barbed wire.
“You know that’s not coming from me, right?” he says.
I don’t know if this is true, here in the room that’s consuming itself, or if James Franco is just trying to paralyze me with his charm. But my heart melts a little anyway. I have the feeling I had once when I ran into Bill Clinton, randomly, and he shook my hand in a way that made me want to devote the rest of my life to hugging him.
Franco slaps me on the shoulder. “Don’t be scared,” he says. And he walks back out into the thickening crowd.
After that I stand for a long time, just outside the plywood house, watching old home videos being projected onto a gallery wall: Franco in a diaper, spraying a garden hose wildly around the yard; Franco climbing in and out of a laundry basket; Franco naked with a yellow balloon. Franco putting both hands up against a mirror, trying to disappear into his own reflection.
I go back and watch the obscene films again, trying to square them with the expensively dressed man standing across the room. This is the paradox of James Franco: Dicknose in Gucci. It’s either hypocrisy or complexity, self-delusion or radical self-acceptance. It’s the defining fault line of his career, the source of much of his energy. Were he to resolve it in one direction or the other, he might cease to be so interesting.
Clutch Magazine Article: The Racism & Sexism In The Fashion Industry Against Black Women Must Not Be Ignored.
A Sea of White Faces
If we look at the sea of White faces on magazine stands worldwide, we realize that the struggle for Black women to be accepted as equals in the world of fashion and beauty continues. The gains that generations of women have made become almost symbolic, and not at all concrete, when we still must talk about such issues.
Every time a Black editor, writer or stylist is hired by a magazine, no matter if it is a Black-centered or a mainstream magazine, it feels as though we might be on the right track. We think we’re gaining momentum, but the sad truth is that is not the case. Are Black women getting hired in the ever-so-competitive world of magazine publishing? And by hired we also mean getting a magazine cover. It would seem that no, they are not. And because there are so many things that rightly concern us so much more, we have not been making as big a deal out of this fact as we probably should. Indeed, no other group of women are being told what to do, think, or say (and when) as much as Black women. With the “whitewashing” of magazine covers, we are effectively being told to back down, shut up and put up with whatever it is the ”powers that be” dish out. Even Black women sometimes seem to give up, and continue to buy magazines that for decades have not honored them.
By continuously putting the crossover cover stars (you know who they are) on major glossies, we are being told that the girls who do not visibly have White ancestry are not good enough. That beauty is being White or light-skinned. Even light-skinned is not enough, as when was the last time you saw an Asian woman, let alone a Black one, on a major magazine? Is Rihanna seriously the only Black girl out there? Or Beyoncé? These are the two women that South African magazines–who do not overtly cater to the Black women market, peddle to their readers, year in and year out. Like a tired dishcloth wrung too many times. In fact, when I was an intern at one of the most well-known magazines here (with an international name), I once suffered a mild shock to my entire system. The editor at the time stated that “This is a White magazine.” So that was the reason their hiring policy has always been non-inclusive, and the few Black faces are there for “color interests,” “Black economic empowerment,” or more accurately – window-dressing. If they had a full complement of staff, that they respected and took seriously, we would not need to call it that. And we would not still be angry over their cover choices.
The magazine cover that infuriated me most this year was Elle South Africa’s cover with Alek Wek. I should have been joyful, right? She’s a dark, African girl on the cover of the world’s style bible, albeit with a South African touch. But I was not. One of the cover-lines was, in my opinion, an absurd placement next to an internationally renowned cover star. A Black writer, one of the few that has written for this magazine in recent years, dared ask the question: “Do Black covers sell?” Rising up from my spluttering indignation, I tripped over the elephant in the room. I looked straight at what was then only a teaser on a media website, and asked Alek’s image out loud: “How could they do this to you?” I was angry and mystified. She is a fabulous African woman, and more representative of where we are than anyone they have put on their cover for a long time, yet they dare to ask this question.
I understand that it’s a question White editors around the world have asked themselves, but to see such an ignorant, flippantly arrogant and insensitive question in a land where most of who you see are Black faces? But there they were, acting as if South Africa were somehow “Little Europe in Africa” and completely missing the point that some of the best-selling women’s magazines in the entire country are Black women’s magazines with Black women on the cover. These magazines sell to their target demographic rapidly, because they respect their readers. Anyone can look at circulation figures for a given magazine and see this, as it is not kept secret.
The publishing industry’s business models need a total overhaul – a revamp. I am not, obviously, a big business owner, and nor do I pretend to know everything that there is to know about publishing. Yet the insights I have gained, however, tell me this: Black women are still being highly disrespected in this country. South African publishers are taking us for a ride when they think they can stock their magazines in our neighbourhoods and not feature or cater to us at all. Sure they’ll throw in the one or two Black faces, but that’s it. They might do a Black cover every now and then, but at their book and management meetings they will say, “See, the numbers are low, these covers don’t sell.” They then decided to rehash a Jennifer Aniston cover, or Cameron Diaz. I do not recall either of these women ever having stepped on South African soil. Meanwhile, most circulation figures have been going down and magazines are in a precarious position.
At a time when magazines are folding left and right, and these publishers are still clinging to their old business models (and White and cappuccino-colored cover models) you would think they might have learned a thing or two. It’s a tricky business. And yes, you only remain on top by giving people what they want. Yet ignoring a substantial number of women, and not tapping into their energies, and, at the bottom line–their financial power–is just plain stupid. It shows the level of racism and lack of respect that White publishers have long held for Black women. Looking through some online responses to the Alek Wek issue, I found some comments that mirrored my own thoughts. One commentator wrote “I’m much more shocked to see that tagline on an African magazine than I would be on an American or European one.”
I refused to buy that magazine, even though I adore Alek and look at her 1997 Elle magazine cover as a collector’s item. That was a turning point for me. Up until that time, it was rare to see any black faces on covers unless they were Essence, Ebony or Jet. I thought things would change, but thirteen years later, and nothing has changed except the clothes Alek is wearing on another Elle cover.
As a Black woman standing on African soil, I felt insulted by the article. I felt that it was yet another method by which White magazine publishers try to circumvent the truth, which is that Black covers have been selling extremely well in various markets, especially this one. I, however, was not going to be coerced into picking up that magazine because it had the psychological effect of a slap on the face with a wet rag.
We have put up long enough with the racism that says “White will sell” and “White is beautiful” even in a majority Black country like South Africa. I wondered what was going on in other African settings, so I asked a few of my friends to do some checking.
In Tanzania, Sandra reported, “There are hardly any White faces staring at you from the covers of our local glossies here in TZ. However, about a good 99 percent of the cover models are very light in complexion. Even the models used for the ads seem to be lighter skinned, which is apparently preferred. And of course, the longer horse tails you have, the better.”
Francis in Zambia found that most magazines on the rack in his hometown were foreign magazines that featured mainly White people. An avid Arise magazine reader, he said “The newsagents put out what sells here. I believe it’s mainly because of the misconception that Black models and Black women in general are less versatile then their white counterparts. However if you look at Tyra, Naomi, Alek and Iman they all come from different countries, their looks are all different, and they are all physically dissimilar. They’re diverse.”
Dineo, a South African who lives in the most urban part of the country, which includes Johannesburg and Tshwane, says the situation is dire. “When it comes to faces of color, they are always on Drum, Bona, Soul, and Real… those kinds of magazines. It’s very rare otherwise. Beyoncé and Rihanna can only be shown so much. What is also frustrating is that even when they appear on the likes of Cosmo or other glossies, where is the representation inside?”
Gugu from Soweto confirmed what has become very clear. In the Black townships, the magazines at what are known as spaza shops are those with White covers.
Dineo, who lives in the high-income neighbourhood of Waterkloof Ridge, in Tshwane, says it’s the same. These are costly magazines with international names, yet they find space on many newsstands, even the predominantly Black areas. That’s the cheek of it – especially considering how White editors simply do not wish to cater to the Black population, yet they will gladly take their money. It is true that some Black women simply do not care. They can afford the magazine, so why not buy it is what I’ve heard some say in discussions focusing on the non-inclusive nature of some magazines.
While it’s true that Cosmopolitan consistently puts more Black faces on their cover than any other international magazine, the representation only goes so far. Black covers can only do so much, if magazines are not hiring Black writers, stylists and editors. There is only one Black editor that I know of, on any of the major international glossies. The editor of O, The Oprah Magazine South Africa, is Black. (In South Africa she is seen as colored or mixed-race) In industry circles, using a colored model, who they often term “cappuccino,” is the most accepted rule of thumb to circumventing actually hiring a dark Black South African model. In fact, it is hard for to even come up with a Black South African model’s name. Many of the girls they use on shoots are Brazilian, American, British or Nigerian. But even those Black girls do not make the covers of Elle, Marie Claire, Cosmopolitan, Glamour, Women’s Health, FHM, Sports Illustrated among other prints. All the international glossies that compete with home-grown South African talent like Destiny and True Love, for a place in Black women’s hearts and minds, rarely honor Black women by giving them covers, or positions with the publication.
At my local grocery store in Cape Town, I scanned the newsstands. Everyone and their grannies frequent this store – all colors, all faiths. Out of 27 glossy magazines in the English language, four had Black people on the cover. One was Good Housekeeping with Michelle Obama. Another, with Nelson Mandela as cover star on Destiny – the second offering from Khanyi Dhlomo’s publishing group, which is one of the few Black-owned publishers in the country. It is significant that Destiny is the only magazine that I have seen that speaks to all kinds of women. She has put people of almost every color group in the country on the cover and within the magazine’s pages.
If the opportunities for young Black women are closed even before they’ve begun, this is indeed dire. For how long can we keep telling our sisters and daughters that yes, they matter, and yes, they are just as beautiful and vital as everyone else in the world, but we’re not fighting hard enough for them to have a place in the sun? At the end of the day, a cover on its own simply does not matter. What matters is the implied racism behind constantly being ignored – as if you do not exist. Yes, there are a myriad number of issues that affect us globally as Black women. But carving us out of substantial parts of the economy and the media–via rendering us invisible to the world at large– is making the statement that we do not matter. Those who do not matter inevitably get left behind. Yet here we are, and perhaps our best bet lies only with ourselves.
Gayblackcanada 