Viral Transmission

"This is just to test your blood pressure," said Art reassuringly, noticing that the sweating was becoming excessive. As soon as the first slight pressure was applied to the bulb, the man moved. Without warning he screamed in terror and Art was on the floor... The Onion Field, location 459


Joseph Wambaugh's depiction of gay panic is quite different in text than in the screen play adaptation which led to the film, so different even the dowager isn't sold by what is going on in the company Ian keeps on his way to becoming a martyr in the name of law enforcement. In the movie, Ted Danson's Ian is a hastily contrived pastiche, because Wambaugh's underlying concern, as transmuted by the director, is the reverberating impact of justice as a convoluted process. In the book itself, whatever Ellroy's introductory praises, all of Wambaugh's character development seems like a hatchet job, as if he is desperate to imitate Capote and swallows his tongue in the process. This makes Onion Field a fascinating period piece, despite itself, and Wambaugh's hatchet has a nascent driving energy which intimates a command to skip the movie and read the true crime saga in the troubled years of Nixonion paranoia; but the screen writers for the film at least made homosexuality and vice recognizable. Wambaugh, by contrast, seems quite incidentally to border on science fiction.

By 1973 the dowager was growing up in the world, forcibly incarcerated just like Art's patient, and people didn't flip out over a blood pressure cuff due to sexual impulses. They might cry over girls on the ward engaging in mock lesbian teasing, to establish pecking order, as primate groups do, but this curious piece of exposition in the first chapter teeters on the edge of dramaturgic abstract art, as if Michael Rooker's serial killer was introduced on stage by Becket.

If the dowager was inconsiderate to Nick Denton in tweeting her repugnance for Michael Hall's brave and brief exchange with his fictional minority law enforcement officer, it was deliberate, but not quite due to prudent shock. Denton looks ambiguous, the way most radical Britons out of the radical left Labour wing do, and just as most radical Anglo Saxons do, male or female, they reach out to minority short order cooks to make political statements, perhaps covertly, through their sexual liaisons, and Denton does the same thing with his partner, besmirching marriage as a sacrament, defiant and in your face: I'm gay and love a black American. So what? The Western middle class has found a method of appropriating gay difference: elevating homosexual monogamy, even while medical epidemiologists' like Fauci hover in the background. Oh, they don't judge, but they are they failsafes policing sexual adventurism which by normal social standards are still considered criminal, like the use of handcuffs for restraint, for instance. And in a gay cross race relationship, there is always a bit of a hustle going on, cashing in on white privilege. I know it because I've been there, and indeed, could roll out on Market Street in my haggard skirt attire and pick up three black men willing to sleep with me, a broken welfare spastic, but a white broken welfare spastic, nothing more than a reprehensible power play, damning me into abomination territory. I'd like to remind the Holy Father, in this vein, that whatever his Marxist sentiments due to his Argentine background, he is the last Prince on the face of the earth whose statements have world renown impact, and one of religion's remaining functions is to name apostasy for what it is. You are not just a victim's advocate Francis, you carry thousands of years of Roman authority in that burden on your shoulders, and the growing material power of people like Thiel and Denton needs to be countermanded. The battle between them is almost akin to the sins to be plucked out of the Divine Comedy. Denton revels in sexual exposure because he wants to be accepted as a non-deviation, while Thiel blows 10 million on civil tort because he isn't quite gay enough to flout it in a parade, while broken withered crones can't even get a paralegal to do a case assessment on her life long toxic environments and medical model brutality which improved nothing on her original issues wrought by brain damage. Being able to blatantly buy the law simply because an individual created a flicker of a wrestling personality are episodes through which class resentment could trigger serious social unrest.