Some Personal Reflections on the Film The Groomsmen;

  Or, Some Thoughts on Being Irish, Catholic and Gay

By Kerry McCabe

I’m an old Ed Burns fan.  I’ve enjoyed him from the inception of his first film, The Brothers McMullen, which was pulled together on a shoestring budget when Burns was a Hollywood unknown.  I was pleased to see that his subsequent fame has not diminished his talents.  The Groomsmen, a film that he wrote, directed and starred in (recently released on DVD) is just as delightful as his earlier work.

It’s not only Burns’s filmmaking expertise that I appreciate.  I can also truly relate to his experiences in being an Irish American Catholic.  With this film however, Burns gave me something else that I could personally connect with.  In The Groomsmen, in an incredibly sensitive manner, Burns introduces a character who happens to be Catholic and gay.

Burns is best at sketching the relationships between Irish Catholic men and the way he goes about this cuts to my soul.  This is because I had the personal misfortune of growing up completely surrounded by brothers.  Like Burn’s characters, my own brothers, my male cousins and their friends, were loud, hard-drinking jokers who reveled in what I always viewed as a lot of unbridled white male freedom.  They all had the gift of gab and were prolific storytellers; however, none of them had a clue as to how to express their own true feelings.

Among Irish Catholics, heterosexuality and the nuclear family are culturally dictated norms.  Unless they died first from drug abuse or alcoholism, most of my male relatives were eventually rescued by some good women, who civilized them and settled them down.  I saw this echoed the way that Burns portrays women.   Many of Burn’s male characters view females in two categories: the long suffering (if not virginal) wife or some evil type woman who is sexually loose or bitchy.  

My own life matched none of these categories.  Since being a butch lesbian was about as off the map as you could get, the alienation and sexism that I felt from my own brothers has left me apprehensive about men.  It has made it hard for me to trust men or to see them as having many redeeming qualities.    

Also, in evaluating my sisters-in-law or other women in my family, part of me has bought into what women are “supposed” to be.  I have always felt on many levels that I’ve failed as a woman.    This is because I was never been a mother and I have fashioned a life for myself that is financially and emotionally independent of men.   

The gay guy in The Groomsmen is T.C. (John Leguizamo), a male in his mid thirties.  He grew up with a group of Irish buddies and they all reunite to stand up for his friend Pauly’s (Burns’s) wedding.  T.C. is the only groomsman who has been living outside of his hometown.  When pressed at to why he left, he reluctantly admits that he’s queer.

The pronouncement comes as much of a surprise to the audience as it does to his pals.  T.C. is not stereotypical.  Like his friends, he’s New York tough.  In the beginning of the movie, he matches a challenge by one of the other men by putting up his fists.   T.C. also shows extreme juevos by coming out to this macho crowd.

Burn’s portrayal of T.C. especially spoke to me, because so much of my own internalized homophobia stems from my childhood roots.  For several decades now, in many ways I have escaped that childhood.   I have found a home in San Francisco where I can be blatantly out.  Still, like T.C., the deepest feelings about myself still reside in the culture of my youth.  So much of who I am, so many of my values, have much more to do with my childhood than with the gay world in which I often now take refuge.  The gay culture can be comforting and at times entertaining, but it falls severely short of defining who I am.

Perhaps this is why I can’t quit measuring myself by the standards of my childhood friends and relatives.  No matter what I achieve in life, it is so easy to sink into feeling less than and that deficit is always related to being gay.  I know other gay people have these feelings, but I think those of us who grow up Catholic or with other religious backgrounds, are especially challenged.  My own partner, who grew up in a family of free thinking atheists, laughs at me when I express these feelings.  She’s completely happy and proud to live as a lesbian and she wonders why I continue to compare myself to people who have so little to do with my present life.  She also wonders why I still consider myself a Catholic when my religious upbringing has been so damaging to my own sense of self.

I don’t have any easy answers for her.  I tell her that part of my being Catholic is just cultural.  It’s like being Jewish.  You grow up with these rituals and traditions and as you age, you tend to take consolation in their familiarity.  It’s also easier for me to use the vehicle of Catholicism in my quest for finding “God.”  It’s simpler for me to take this recognizable path, even though I realize that there are so many paths that lead toward spirituality.

On the other hand, I may be Catholic because I saw the church’s role in binding my family together.  The church was always present for significant family events…weddings, funerals, baptisms…maybe I’m still trying to connect with my family by staying connected to the church.

 I also feel that there is some healing that can take place if I return to the scene of some of my more painful memories.  Maybe that’s why I keep revisiting the church, especially within the safety of my current spiritual support group, which is made up of other gay Catholics.

I loved the film The Groomsmen, because I emulated what T.C. was doing.  Leguizamo so vividly portrayed a gay exile who was going back to put the pieces of his life back together.

One of the things we learn about T.C. is that he has spent his life hiding his homosexuality while listening to his best friends tell fag jokes.  During the film, an older man pulls T.C. aside for some fatherly advice.  The guy informs T.C. that the measure of a true man is one who “gets married, buys a house and has children.”

When TC first comes out to his own father, he is met with disgust and rejection.  In an especially moving scene, T.C. returns to his fathers home, and in a fit of extreme rage starts hurling heavy lawn furniture into a swimming pool.

T.C. carries around a lot of pain, but he’s not a victim.    Through Leguizamo, T.C. displays compassionate sensitivity and profound strength.  Within T.C. I saw some of the better aspects of myself.  These are qualities I forget about when my mind is clouded with internalized homophobia.

Burns captures in a nutshell the lifetime angst of being gay in a Catholic community.   He manages to do this, even though the film is actually a very funny comedy.  And after Burns lets gay people know that he truly understands our pain (perhaps even better than we do ourselves), he goes on to give us hope.

In the end, nobody really cares that T.C. is gay.  They love him anyway.  One of the guys says he always knew that T.C. was gay, so it’s no big secret.  T.C.’s own father embraces him and welcomes him home.  I’ve seen this scenario in other gay character films, but this time, because of my connection with Burns’s work, I could really believe it.

A similar situation materialized for me in real life this summer.  My partner asked to accompany me to a family wedding and I didn’t want her to go.  Like T.C., I had also done a lot of geographical disappearing acts because I was gay.  I’ve had a pattern in my life of rejecting people before they had a chance to reject me.  At this particular wedding, I would be encountering relatives that I hadn’t seen in over thirty years.  I shared with one of my brothers that I was worried about my lover joining me.

“Why?”  he asked.

“Because people will think we’re..together,”  I said.

“Well,” he replied in his typical deadpan Irish way, “If they can’t figure that out, they’ll probably be too stupid to bother with.”

I was startled by my brother’s words because this was the last thing I expected from him.  In fact, part of my fears about inviting my partner had to do with protecting him and the rest of my family.  I didn’t want to embarrass anyone by being an out lesbian at such a public event.  My brother made it clear that my fears were all in my own head and in the process he gave me some sound advice.  It made me realize that a lot of who I remembered my brother to be - a loud, hard drinking, macho Irish male, was not based on fact.  My brother has matured a great deal through the years and I have to stop perceiving him as who I thought he once was. 

And this wisdom goes beyond how I perceive my brother.  I need to address this attitude toward most things in my past.  First of all, the past no longer exists and if I choose to live there, I am not being present today.  Also, so much of what occurred in the past is simply the manifestation of my own perceptions.  And since perceptions differ from person to person, they never represent actual reality.

Although homophobia permeates society and can be very destructive, on some levels it’s just one big misperception.  Like a ghost that continues to haunt me, it is often just a false perception that is based on fear.  I can’t exorcize homophobia from the entire planet, but I can begin to try and stop seeing it in places where it doesn’t exist.

The Groomsmen was a therapeutic film to watch.  First of all, as with most of Burn’s film, it held a mirror up to what I grew up with.  It showed me how difficult that upbringing was, but in the end Burns tells us that in many ways, life is really just one big cosmic comedy.  If we don’t take ourselves too seriously, and if we drop our own resentments and preconceived notions, there may be more about life that has yet to be revealed.  And there may be more goodness in human kind than we realize.   ##