![]() Jimmy Stewart is one of my dad’s favorite Western actors, so Stewart’s collaborations with director Anthony Mann are standards in our home. His persona is built upon a fraudulent certainty-well-crafted, but specious. Wayne is at least partially at fault for our inability to see the ambiguity in him. It’s not autobiographical-for one, my dad is very much alive-but its central character does share more than a passing resemblance to my reality: I am gay, I have roadtripped crosscountry numerous times with my dog, and I share with my dad a love of Westerns. The purpose of the character’s crosscountry drive is to spread his father’s ashes at the sites where various classic Westerns were filmed. ![]() It’s about a gay man on a roadtrip with his dog during a climate catastrophe. I am currently writing a novel in which Wayne is not exactly a character but a looming presence. ![]() You don’t say! How did anyone who knew enough of Wayne to care about this not already know these things about him?īut perhaps I unfairly assume a certain cultural knowledge and literacy about Wayne because I’ve been wrestling with him-the man, the actor, the icon-for much of my adult life. ![]() I must admit to being shocked by the outrage: yes- surprise, surprise-the actor who was a member of the John Birch Society, a cheerleader for the Vietnam War, a supporter of Senator Joseph McCarthy, and an advocate for the Hollywood Blacklist was more a font of vile beliefs than a pillar of progressive values. I woke up on February 18th to the unlikely event of Wayne trending on Twitter. I don’t believe in giving authority and positions of leadership and judgment to irresponsible people.” In that interview from almost half a century ago, Wayne called the movie Midnight Cowboy “perverted” because it’s “a story about two fags.” He argued in favor of this nation’s abhorrent treatment of the Native American peoples: “There were great numbers of people who needed new land, and the Indians were selfishly trying to keep it for themselves.” He also said this doozy of a statement: “I believe in white supremacy until the blacks are educated to a point of responsibility. The tumult began with a tweet by a screenwriter named Matt Williams on the evening of February 17th: “Jesus fuck, John Wayne was a straight up piece of shit.” Williams accompanied those words with screenshots of Wayne’s infamous 1971 Playboy interview. In February of this year, an onslaught of twitter users declared Wayne “cancelled” when they discovered what many of us already knew: that the actor had a pretty extensive record of heinous views and shameful deeds. The joke, of course, is that Wayne is so out of favor in certain pockets of contemporary culture-particularly those vocal online-that a child-molesting, child-murdering clown could somehow be less problematic than the iconic Western actor. ![]() We’d never name him after that John Wayne. At the baby shower the wife’s best friend pulls her aside: “Maybe it’s not my place to say it, but I just can’t believe you’d name your boy after a racist, a misogynist, a homophobe.” “Oh Deb,” the wife says, patting her friend on the shoulder, “you should know us better than that. A man and his wife name their son John Wayne. ![]()
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