The Depths of Shallowness

Oliver Stone, I pity you

Then I think of all the whores you get and then I pity you less. But I still pity you. Because no matter what you did for this movie "Alexander", you were going to get it. I'm not concerned with the quality of the movie; personally I think it's going to suck. Although if "Troy" getting conquered in ten days can make a cool hundred million, Colin Farrell by all rights should have a merry Christmas.

What I do pity you for is that you're getting flak from Christian conservatives bashing the overt "homosexuality" in the movie, not that the ancient greeks knew the meaning of the word. To make matters worse you've got some outraged gay at the Village Voice up in arms because apparently you underrepresented Alexander's "homosexuality". Not that the greeks knew what that was. And to top things off you have some greek yahoos claiming that portraying Alexander the Great as bisexual (not that the greeks knew the meaning of the word) is like portraying JFK as . . . point guard for the LA Lakers and demeans the greeks. That's verbatim by the way (unless they said power forward, which case, I apologize). They obviously didn't see your JFK movie. Or watch basketball in the 60's. I think someone's been having a little too much baklava.
Mmmmm . .. baklava.

The only group that hasn't come to you yet is the one that will attack you for not portraying Alexander the Great's penchant for bestiality (Bucephalus was a good horse, after all). Oh wait, that was CATHERINE the Great. My bad.

Now, Mr. Stone, you don't make it easy on yourself by referring to you portrayal as bisexuality. You could have avoided all this by saying "hey, the greeks didn't discern back then between love of the same sex and love of the opposite sex. sure, you were supposed to procreate, but monogamy was for wimps. Peace, man, free love."

For the greeks, it was acceptable for an older and wiser man to teach a younger man the ways. It was also ok for great men to have many lovers of both sexes. Theoretically, friendships with younger boys were better than sex with women because you were teaching the boys values that would make them great men. All the women could do was give you an illegitimate heir that would one day fight with his brothers for control of your empire/country/mountain villa. Procreation of wisdom over physical procreation and all that. As long as you could control them all (a problem, as it turns out), you were a-ok. The correct term is pederasty by the way. And hedonism. Don't forget that one. There was a lot of that going around.

Honesty, what's the big fuss over this? I know that's a stupid question. I love how we think nowadays that gay is gay and always has been gay. It's not like straight has always been straight. One of the biggest mistakes that the gay community makes is thinking that it is fighting against thousands of years of oppression. That's bullshit. A couple hundred years, oh yeah. Definitely. But the entirety of Western civilization. Women haven't been oppressed under one totalitarian system of values. Several different systems, yes, but I digress

I mean, a lot of Americans seem to think marriage has been the same since Adam and Eve. (Not Adam and STEVE, they say, hurr hurr. dumbasses.) Henry VIII had to change his country's religion to get a divorce. Now you just run off and a piece of paper notarized. Then again, Henry also beheaded a couple of his wives. Calling Alexander gay is like giving your estranged wife the silverware and telling her "just be happy I'm not lopping off your head".

You'll pardon the uneven analogy, but this would be like if in five hundred years someone made a movie about Lincoln and made him a Democrat.

Lincoln was NOT GAY. His wife was just butt-ugly.