My God, John Cameron Mitchell is cute. I'm not sure that I want to jump his bones exactly, but I love just looking at him. I've had a thing for blondes with beaks for some time now. When Ellen DeGeneres and Anne Heche were together and the hot topic among the entertainment press, I was ecstatic. We were getting two blondes with beaks for the price of one! And while ignoring her musical career entirely, I was just becoming a fan of Ashlee Simpson when she first dyed her hair, and then she got a nose job! Pretty much all that she left me is a bit part in The Hot Chick and her brief stint on "7th Heaven" as Simon's girlfriend.

I think what I find attractive about the blonde with a beak is that she's the odd duck out in a category that otherwise defines conventional beauty. As a result, she makes both being odd and being beautiful a little bit easier to take. Ashlee Simpson is certainly more "attractive" after her nosejob, but she's more anonymous also and less interesting. In relation to the DeGeneres/Heche relationship, the beak represented in microcosm the oddity of being gay in a straight world. The more concretely homosexual DeGeneres is more embracing of being strange in general. Her persona is openly derivative of early Woody Allen, which is kind of interesting for a comedienne. While it shows that she's definitely not trying to be the World's Most Desirable Female, she isn't afraid to come off as vulnerable. So many comediennes design themselves as rock hard prototypical feminists, i.e. Janeane Garofalo, Rosie O'Donnell, Roseanne, Wanda Sykes, et cetera. DeGeneres is the rare one to make herself the object of the audience's (albeit somewhat light) derision.

According to myth anyway, the sorta bisexual Heche used her lesbian relationship with DeGeneres to jumpstart her career. Heche had arrived by 1998, starring in Psycho, Return to Paradise and Six Days and Seven Nights. In the last two films, a relatively conventional drama and comedy, she played the love interest and this had a likely unintentional subversive quality. In Psycho however, where distancing artifice is the entire point, Gus Van Sant exploited the subversiveness of using Heche as a sex symbol, her beak of course cementing the bird motif in Hitchcock's original. Less comfortable with being odd, Heche is also less comfortable with being gay. It's interesting to me that both women were sexually abused as children. But while DeGeneres's clear recollection of the molestation contextualizes it as simply a painful memory, with Heche, it manifests itself into a multiple personality disorder. By denying being "damaged," the extra burden of maintaining a facade results in a particularly explosive breakdown either in the form of Heche's desert episode or the popular and critical failure of Van Sant's bizarre Psychoremake.

The beak distinguishes John Cameron Mitchell's Hedwig, a blonde East German partially transsexual rock star (a botched sex change operation left her with a useless one-inch mound of flesh). Drag queens usually have their tell with the nose, as do Jews, and part of the appeal of the Hedwig iconology is in seeing this Aryan archetype perverted by these homosexual and Semitic associations. Onto herself, Hedwig does Cabaret better than Cabaretdoes. As an East German partially transsexual rock star, particularly as a blonde with a beak, Mitchell transforms Hedwig into a consummate sexual icon. She is simultaneously straight and gay, masculine and feminine, a conventional sex symbol while being entirely unconventional. None of these traits are polar opposites of one another; they are all dually embodied, neither one compromised.

I admit being quite suspicious going into Hedwig and the Angry Inch. What I knew was that writer/director/star Mitchell adapted the film from his stage musical of the same name and used the fame he earned from the film's success to become a spokesperson for the Independent Film Channel. I also remember seeing him on "Politically Incorrect" with Bill Maher where he once embarrassingly insisted to an indignant Johnny Rotten that Rotten "loved" bandmate Sid Vicious and would have gotten him off drugs if he could. Despite the fact that he went on to write and direct an acclaimed buzzworthy follow-up with Shortbus, apparently proving that he's the real deal, I smelled something faddish about the whole Hedwig phenomenon. Mitchell seemed to me to be a hipper Nia Vardalos of My Big Fat Greek Wedding fame. Indeed, the first ten minutes or so of the film suggested a skit on "The Ben Stiller Show." I was fully prepared to call "gimmick." Alas, Mitchell is a lot smarter, braver, and more sophisticated than these superficial impressions suggest. The idea of using an East German partially transsexual rock star to satirize the pretension of '70s glam rock is certainly very clever, and Mitchell squeezes plenty of humor out of the concept, but his aspirations go beyond the merely comedic.

Hedwig and the Angry Inch is essentially heartfelt and sincere. On a very real level, Mitchell sees Hedwig as a tragic figure ennobled and empowered through the magic of rock and roll. As Hedwig herself is the consummate sexual icon, Hedwig and the Angry Inch is the consummate movie, often hilarious and heartbreaking at the same time. This is never better illustrated than in a scene where Hedwig's first sexual experience (with a U.S. master sergeant) is delicately implied through the mastication of gummy bears, surely the funniest substitution for oral sex since Vanilla Ice fed Kristin Minter an ice cube in Cool as Ice.

Initially, I groaned a bit when Hedwig revealed in flashback that her father raped her. This seems to invite such worn-to-the-stump simplicities as "Child molestation leads to homosexuality" or the overly reactive counterpart "Child molestation doesn't lead to homosexuality." But as I suggested in my comments about the DeGeneres/Heche relationship (treating it like a work of fiction of course), the bond between molestation and homosexuality may be more metaphorical than literal. A garden-variety homosexual may share with a molestation victim the feeling of being inherently "damaged" and alienated from the rest of society. They may also feel that there is a part of themselves that they must constantly keep secret and can never really fully acknowledge.

The association of a gay sexual orientation with a gay identity typically occurs during adolescence, when an individual is particularly vulnerable to self-mythology. Saddled with a conventionally unpopular sexual identity, persecution fantasies and Christ parables are especially appealing to gay teenagers. It's impossible to write, direct, and star in a film like Hedwig and the Angry Inch without coming off as at least mildly narcissistic. Watching the "Wig in a Box" musical number, I couldn't help but being bowled over when Mitchell intercuts close-ups of himself. Could you imagine the balls on this guy? I think that one of the principal motivations for giving Hedwig a history of sexual abuse is simply to give her a history. Child psychologist David Elkind's specific term for teenage narcissism is "personal fable." Teens like to think their lives are special and they will one day have an "E! True Hollywood Story" made about them. An early incidence of sexual abuse automatically establishes Hedwig as a tragic figure and a survivor. Without it, her meteoric rise to fame and failed romantic relationships appear considerably less significant.

Still, it's fascinating how well Hedwig's story fits into the predominant psychosocial models for the causes of homosexuality. Freud theorized that homosexuality was the result of a failure to resolve the Oedipal complex. In a normal two-parent family, the son falls in love with his mother and, identifying with the predominant male figure, sees his father as competition. But when the father is physically or emotionally unavailable or the mother is the dominant figure of the relationship, the son's adoration of his mother transforms into identification, which in turn transforms into rivalry for the father's love. Freud's theories seem to be supported by studies showing that male homosexuals often grew up with cold and distant fathers. (I should add that these studies are not universally accepted. Many academics suggest that such studies misattribute causality to a simple correlation. Fathers may reject their sons after sensing that they are homosexual and as such, undesirable.)

In Hedwig and the Angry Inch, Mom kicks Dad out when she finds out that he has been having his way with her son. Dad barely makes an appearance in the film and that's sort of the point. Hedwig mentions that his father was an American G.I. and what do you know, the first real love of his life was an American master sergeant! The "absent father" theory doesn't have a lot of currency when you read it as causing homosexuality through a lack of proper gender socialization. If masculinity is defined as rugged individualism, the homosexual male actually has greater potential for being masculine than the heterosexual male. He never has to succumb to the pro-social collectivism of family formation. But the idea has some meat to it if you regard male-on-male intimacy as being a natural need typically fulfilled through fatherhood and the homosexual orientation as being a (potentially maladaptive?) means to compensate for this lack of intimacy. Which would explain why Hedwig's first love shares the same nationality and career field as his missing father. The implication is that the molestation itself is not the cause of Hedwig's homosexuality, it's his mother's reaction to it.

Hedwig is not the character's real name. She was born Hansel. Hedwig is her mother's name, adopted

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