Noam Gonick Goes All Ironic And Confuses Almost Everyone

Please, please, please gay intelligentsia, I beseech you, clever satire and post-modern irony, at any level, is a failure. As evidence, a film by Canadian raconteur Noam Gonick, who insists that Pride is quickly becoming “a military parade” that celebrates conformity – cultural, political, and sexual – by the gay community, who, and I speak from my own experience, seem to have mistaken acceptance for assimilation. Gonick’s point is profoundly accurate; he could not be more right, but the film he created to communicate that conceit – No Safe Words – is so art school graduate project that the message has been lost, like you knew it would.

Part porn, part political diatribe, and entirely errant, the film, discussed anywhere and everywhere today, never makes the grade Gonick I am certain had hoped for. Points – and again, I can not concur more with Noam – need to be delivered clearly, with an explicitness that leaves no room for interpretation, since the wider audience … not that smart.