Can I Be Frank (4*)

While re-reading my journals--I'm nearing the end of my 50th blue hardcover, each 120 pages long--I find that topical jokes really pinpoint a moment in time that may have receded from memory.  Like this one during the AIDS epidemic:  

Do you know the hardest thing about an HIV-positive diagnosis?  Convincing your parents you're Haitian!

You probably have to have lived through those awful early years to find that mordant joke funny now that marriage equality is the law of the land and we've entered an era of "gay elder" appreciation.  The latter is a driving force behind "Can I Be Frank?," a frenetic Pride month performance during which Morgan Bassichis, standing in front of a life "preserver" backdrop, pays tribute to Frank Maya, America's first openly gay stand-up comic. Sometimes, homage can be a form of resurrection; Maya died in 1995, just before protease inhibitors commuted AIDS from the death penalty to life imprisonment.

Unfamiliar with Maya, I watched him being interviewed by Dick Cavett, who I normally enjoy, but whose supercilious discomfort with homosexuality in 1991 was more than a little off-putting.  Maya, three years my senior, seemed pretty laid back: the kind of "masc" hunk instantly recognizable only to other friends of Dorothy and their "hags," but whom few other people would peg as somebody who enjoyed getting fucked.  Bassichis, on the other hand, is a screaming queen who aptly describes himself as something that walked in "out of a folk tale." But he adds a contemporary patina of knowing, ironic fierceness to Maya's routines, some of which have aged better than others.  Celebrity letters from heaven, for example, is hilarious if you get the references.

One joke, in particular, pretty much sums up the differences between comedy then and now, and between Maya and Bassichis.  Maya asserts that fame is the only cure for homosexuality, which Bassichis initially interprets as the compensating reward that material comforts and acceptance provide.  Maya, however, got the laugh because going back in the closet and insisting you're straight is the only way you can maintain fame once you achieve it.  Just ask the much better-remembered Pee-wee Herman.

Bassichis shifts gears at the end, adding a kind of teachable moment about how the LGBTQ+ community has persevered in the face of discrimination and tragedy. Like Maya, he incorporates music into his performance, transforming the title of a 1989 essay by Douglas Crimp, another gay elder, into a requiem he sings over to a suddenly quiet, sobered house:  mourning and militancy, he drones again and again.

It's advice about carrying on that, unlike humor, doesn't seem to have aged at all.