I am Michael

By: Sir

no faster way to say this:
The musical score on this trailer is blaring, and the audio on this is not even discernable.
was this the intention?
also James Franco is not hard on working the gay world, he only wrote a book which did not even declare his orientation, just exploit the homosexuals, Dispicable. He is not helping any of us, onkly lining his pockets, his only intention.

By: Amos Lassen

"I Am Michael"
An Inverted Coming-Out Story
Amos Lassen
There are times that we have high hopes for a film that we have heard about and is in progress. With "I am Michael", I had heard that it was in progress and would be released at the 2015 Sundance Film Festival and it was but it was exactly the film that I had been expecting. Such is the problem with high hopes. Several things went wrong and although I have no idea why, they hurt this film and instead of becoming a provocative look at an ex-gay man, it feel somewhat flat. James Franco who has been such a friend of the LGBT community seems to be terribly miscast in a film that could have cemented his career as a fine actor. Be that as it may, let's have a look at the film here.

James Franco plays Michael Glatze, a pioneering gay rights activist who later denounced his homosexuality. Here is an inverted coming-out tale. Glatze, a pioneering gay rights activist, shocked the community by denouncing his homosexuality and embarking on a new life as a Christian pastor. He had been a San Francisco based writer and journalist and founded his own publication "Young Gay America" in 2004, that provided support and gave a voice to queer youth. Following years of dedication to the cause, he underwent an identity crisis and found himself drawn to religion and a more conservative outlook on life. In 2007, he left the magazine and his boyfriend of 10 years and started all over again. Once again in this film, James Franco displays his commitment to the portrayal of LGBT characters in US cinema. jumping at yet another chance to play gay. He has a much-publicized threesome with Zachary Quinto (Bennett, his lover) and Charlie Carver The film deals with the issues of homophobia, both internalized and within the wider culture, and the complexities of sexual identity.
The film was passionately directed by Justin Kelly and it is a sincere look at Glatze and his sincerity is felt throughout yet there are problems. Even with the very fine performance by Franco, there is a certain ambivalence to the film. The questions remain, "What caused Glatze's dramatic shift? How could Michael, once so outspoken in favor of the gay lifestyle, justify causing his former friends and colleagues such pain? How did someone so stridently anti-religious become such a devout Christian? Was he reprogrammed? Did he truly believe he was no longer gay? Was he physically attracted to women now? What was he thinking?" The answers to these questions could have made this quite a dramatic film but instead they were just given simplistic answers.

Early in the film Glatze says that there is really no such thing as gay and that it is a "false identity". We know that this is not a true statement and that our sexuality is a part of our personality and that it is somewhere in both genetics and environment. I really want to know what brought Glatze to this thought. We see him as a person who has no options and believes that there is no beginning and no end. He feels lost without his parents. His thinking is impulsive and he does not grasp who he is. He most certainly was unaware of what the results of his change of lifestyle would be but instead Kelly gives us Glatze as a man who carefully considers each of his life choices before he makes them. Because of this the film should examine the man's motivations and deconstruct his personality. Here was a gay man who had confidence yet he destroyed so many people as he "changed" from gay to straight. Even when he told his lover that he wanted to live with his mother and father who had been killed, we do not detect sincerity and it is not a reason to take on a new sexuality (as if that were even possible).
We see Michael walking around and thinking a good deal in the film. He tells Bennett, his partner that he has had revelations and that he made decisions but we do not see or hear any rationality for them. At the time, the gay community was in a state of uproar and Michael is convinced that they are wrong. We never see how he justifies what he did to Bennett, a man who had supported him and shown him unconditional love. We really want to know what caused the change in Michael but we never really get the answer to that.
I remember reading "My Ex-gay Friend" by Benoit Denizet Lewis, the provocative article in the New York Magazine that was the basis for the film. Something happened as it was transferred to the screen and it seems that Franco was meant to carry the entire film on his shoulders yet the script undermines that. Franco indeed gives a brilliant performance and his facial experiences mesmerize-we feel his pain yet we really never know why.
.I am quite sure that some moviegoers will be upset and that there will be a lot of discussion about this film that emphasizes Glatze's self-doubt, fear and prejudice that for many is associated with modern homosexuality. Perhaps if we had seen Glatze's coming out story, we might better understand him. The act of coming-out for most gay men is a feeling of liberation that brings us to a bond with other gay people and since this is such a monumental moment that really only gay people have to deal with, it would have been quite an important moment in the film. Glatze's coming-out is a different type than most and then there is his change when he is reborn as a fundamentalist Christian. Both of these come with great emotion and they share feelings of conflict and shame. It is quite shocking to see Glatze betray others but it even shocking to see him betray himself. In a sense he betrays all those who have come out and who have found peace.

So what made Michael Glatze such a unique individual? Since he had been such a vocal advocate for gay teens who has reached so many through his magazine, he helped a great many young men deal with their sexuality. He provided positive images and role models for the young gays. The screenplay for the film seems to say that Glatze had a very deep desire to get to heaven and his decision to become "ungay" was a response to a series of "prompts". One of those prompts was probably the three-way he shared with Bennett and a college kid named Tyler (Charlie Caver) and in it we see that Glatze and Bennett may not have been so happy together as we were to think they were. Glatze began to withdraw from meetings with other gay men and stopped going to clubs and he began to focus on his mother and whether he and she would be reunited somewhere in the afterlife. Surely gay men are sinners, he thinks, and therefore by being gay, he deprives himself of ever seeing his mother again. Then he has a series of panic attacks and attributes them to a divine plan that will cause him to change who he is.
He had once been considered to be the intellectual behind his magazine as well as an expert at queer-theory who could argue questions of identity and desire from a rational, well-read position. Then he began to study the Bible and used Matthew 10:39 as a sort of justification to deny that aspect of his life that had once defined who he was. He felt that if he didn't denounce homosexuality as an invented, "abnormal" identity, he would be doomed and he began counseling troubled teens to that effect. Not everything in Glatze changed-he kept his evangelical instinct that he used with young gays but applied it now to Jesus. It was one thing for him to "learn" about himself but it was something else for him to try to change others with his own self-formulated religious beliefs. Then he met Rebekah (Emma Roberts), a naïve young woman who was flexible enough to accept his past.
What we must remember is that Glatze's story is singular and it cannot be used to interpret and/or justify LGBT lives. Watching him gives a feeling of discomfort and it is this discomfort that makes this an interesting film. As he began his move into Christianity, we are to understand that it had to do with his personality traits. Glatze seemed to have become lost in the superficiality of the gay subculture that hasn't had the privileges of self-love and self-esteem that mainstream organizations provide. He felt disconnected. We cannot neglect his story or others like it because to do so is to grant them power-an undeserved power. This story is one of a very confused person.
*Note: Even though the film is titled "I Am Michael", I chose to refer to the main character by his last name. I just never felt close enough to him to call him Michael.