Swan Song -

This movie literally popped up in my radar over the weekend and after the first minute, I knew that I had to watch it. It had Udo Kier (icon!) and a story that grabbed me by the throat and never let go until the final credits. 

Pat Pitsenbarger was the Liberace of Sandusky, as a character calls him. But when we meet the retired hairdresser in "Swan Song," a new film from Todd Stephens, Pat's wearing sad, saggy sweatpants at a retirement home and fills his hours refolding napkins he cages from the cafeteria. But a request to do hair one last time for the funeral of an old client sets him on a long walk through the town and through his past.

NPR

I saw myself in Pat. Not because I'm a hairdresser, or because I live in a tiny town in Ohio. Or because I live in a retirement home (that being a possibility, given that I don't have children and I don't know if I will be coupled at that age). But because I already see the differences between me and people who were born at the eve of the new millenium in what concerns thought and worldview. We seem to come from very different worlds and I guess we do. We do not take the same things for granted and we do not share a common past. I feel ancient when I talk to twenty year olds.

So many things have happened in the last twenty years that I feel like I've lived fifty years in that time, instead. And this generation does not even notice the changes the world has gone through. Pat to me was more a small town version of Quentin Crisp, a favorite of my friend Abandon and a Queer elder I admire. Liberace? Too closeted. Pat Pitsenbarger was the real thing: brazen, courageous, daring. He blazed a trail in that town. The kids in that bar he visits owed him and all the loud and proud small-town florists, interior decorators, manicurists, seamstresses, and queer folks who came before them a debt of gratitude and they didn't even know it. I'd have to say that there's no 'gay culture' in America nowadays, and we are less fab because of that. 

With all the shenanigans the Repugs and the Religulous are pulling on LGBTQ rights right now (go read Bob's post) and with the possibility of SCOTUS deciding that 'religious freedom' is an excuse for LGBTQ discrimiation, this movie got me in my feels.

So if you have time, watch it. It's on the streaming services and On Demand. It's a good reminder of how things were, when we see the world through Pat's eyes. And how things could be again, if the Repugs retake the power they had with Cheeto and the bigots get away with codifying hatred and ignorance.

XOXO

P.S. there's a cameo by Linda Evans!