Popular entertainment plays a huge role in romanticizing homosexuality for the younger generation. The latest craze at the movies is "Rent" (from the long-running Broadway show). High school chorus directors across the country promote this musical by programming its theme song, "Seasons of Love". (Get the kids so worked up they just have to see the movie!)
Supposedly a take-off on Puccini's opera "La Boheme", "Rent" employs the cheap emotion of doomed, dying lovers -- all that's needed to wrench young people's hearts in the cause of "homosexual rights". In "Rent", the characters are drug addicts, strippers, drag queens, and lesbians dying of AIDS. It goes beyond romanticizing AIDS victims, however. The drinking song, "La Vie Boheme", has upbeat lyrics praising "leather, dildos, masturbation, bisexuals, trisexuals, sodomy, S&M". Fun fun fun! Can't wait to go to New York and be part of that scene...
The Boston Globe's review is critical only of the lighting and the staging of the production numbers in the movie. The Globe seems to miss the hideous transformation of a classic love story (between a seamstress dying from consumption and a poor poet, in the original) into needless, preventable deaths resulting from drug use and sexual perversion. From the Globe review:
It's taken them nine years to get there, but the award-winning collection of junkies, drag queens, and activist urchins from the East Village have finally made it to Hollywood. And in the movie version of ''Rent," they are such a cute and cuddly bunch it's easy to leave the theater thinking you've just seen ''Muppets Take Manhattan," instead....
Holding the story lines together are Mark ... and Roger ..., roommates in an illegal industrial loft. One's a filmmaker, the other an ex-junkie rock songwriter. Their professor friend, Collins ..., gets mugged and is rescued by Angel ..., a benevolent drag queen. They both happen to be HIV-positive and fall in love.
Mimi is the stripper junkie who lives downstairs from Roger. They fall in love, too. Also in love are Mark's ex, Maureen ..., and Joanne.... People bicker, they dance, they die.
Excerpts from lyrics to one of the songs in "Rent", "La Vie Boheme" (and we've read this was a toned-down version!):
Wine and beer!
To hand-crafted beers made in local breweries
To yoga, to yogurt, to rice and beans and cheese
To leather, to dildos, to curry vindaloo
Emotion, devotion, to causing a commotion
Creation, vacation
Mucho masturbation
Compassion, to fashion, to passion when it's new
To Sontag
To Sondheim
To anything taboo...
La vie Boheme
Bisexuals, trisexuals, homo sapiens,
Carcinogens, hallucinogens, men,
Pee Wee Herman...
To apathy, to entropy, to empathy, ecstasy ...
The Sex Pistols, 8BC,
To no shame - never playing the Fame Game
To marijuana
To sodomy,
It's between God and me
To S & M ...
