July 2007 Cover
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By
Michael Bronski
When You Were Me
by Robert Rodi
Kensington Books
How to order
There's something extremely queer about shape-shifting and body transfers. Think of all the sexual undertones and shenanigans in Ovid's
Metamorphoses. Although many don't end
happily-- Callisto is turned into a bear by Zeus's wife Hera, and then nearly speared by Arcas, her own son-- Ovid's tales deftly explicate the many avenues of romantic and carnal love. Robert
Rodi's When You Were Me is the latest of a long line of homoerotically-tinged novels and films about metamorphosis and body-switching, and while it can't compete with the best of
its predecessors, Rodi carries the genre into our present moment.
O
vid aside, the queer granddaddy of these works is undoubtedly Thorne Smith's great 1931 novel
Turnabout, in which an ill-tempered minor Egyptian god, who lives in an antique
figurine, turns tables on a chic, always-quarreling modern couple by placing each in the other's body.
Turnabout was the perfect vehicle for discussing the shifting gender roles of the 1930s and
got resurrected as a 1940s film and a 1979 television show. This gender-bending tale was the precursor for films such as Vincente Minnelli's 1964
Goodbye Charlie (in which a murdered adulterer comes back to earth as Debbie Reynolds) and Blake Edwards's 1991
Switch (in which a sexist man comes back to earth as Ellen Barkin), as well as countless TV skits.
Same-gender switching has been most popular in the
Freaky Friday movies. The first version of the film stared Jodie Foster as a teenage girl who swaps bodies with her beleaguered mother, Barbara
Harris. A TV remake in 1995 starred Shelley Long and Gaby Hoffman, and a second, classier, remake appeared in 2003 with a very sexy Jamie Lee Curtis and a seemingly sober Lindsay Lohan.
Each of the films brought up uncomfortable sexual undercurrents as mothers and daughters become involved in one another's erotic lives.
Other variants on the theme-- Here Comes Mr.
Jordan (1941) and its remake Heaven Can
Wait (1978)-- don't deal with the sexual angle as such, but are clearly propelled along with a
certain type of queer anxiety about identity and masculinity.
Robert Rodi's novel When You Were Me mixes elements from all these stories and makes the context explicitly gay, thus making the queer subtext of metamorphosis more visible,
while simultaneously constraining alternative readings of his plot. Neither a quarreling heterosexual married couple nor mother- and-daughter, Rodi's characters are Jack Ackerly (a stodgy,
just-turned-50 gay man who has done everything that was expected of him) and Corey Szaslo (a 26-year-old party boy). Thanks to Francesca La Bash, a literary reinvention of Noel
Coward's daffy Madame Arcati, the two men switch bodies and lives. The transformative couple gets to live out their fantasy of how other queens live and love.
All in all, this isn't a bad idea for a novel-- albeit an idea cobbled together from a shelf-full of past works. The trouble here is that the obvious overwhelms the subtle, and what should
be dexterous satire is too often low farce. Much of the novel relies on playing and replaying obvious gay stereotypes. It's not that Rodi doesn't have a lot on his mind-- the last chapters of
his book are powerful in a way readers weren't lead to expect. We're left with just a glimpse into the potential of this plot device, which was also put to good use in Sarah Schulman's 1992
novel Empathy and Craig Lucas's 1990 play about AIDS,
Prelude to a Kiss.
Thorne Smith set the pattern here in mining the rich seams of metamorphosis and refining its queer ore. There's substantial material here: the sheer permeability of
sex-and-the-psyche juxtaposed with the anxieties around maintaining a staunchly-held identity that's probably a product of long attainment, and perhaps secured by oppressive social mores. Part of
Rodi's problem is that while the gay world certainly has its share of identity-slots, these are often also flexible. The topsy-turvy work of
When You Were Me is just not as topsy-turvy as
the heterosexual worlds of Turnabout or mother/daughter frisson of
Freaky Friday. The melodies of When You Were
Me get compressed within too monotonic a scale.
| Author Profile: Michael Bronski |
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Michael Bronski is the author of
Culture Clash: The Making of Gay
Sensibility and The Pleasure
Principle: Sex, Backlash, and the
Struggle for Gay Freedom. He writes
frequently on sex, books, movies, and
culture, and lives in Cambridge,
Massachusetts. |
| Email: |
mabronski@aol.com |
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