Safer Behind Popcorn
By Sean Hanrahan
Cajun Mutt Press 2019
Reviewed by Chris Kaiser
“The writing style creates a breathless, frenzied energy that almost feels like we’re swept up in a movie narrative.”
The full-length collection of poetry titled Safer Behind Popcorn by Sean Hanrahan is a whirlwind journey through old and new Hollywood and popular culture, exploring not only the absence of notably gay figures, but also the damage that such absence does to the psyche of young and impressionable LGBTQ minds.
Hanrahan uses biting wit and an immense storehouse of film knowledge to probe the inner and outer boundaries of a suffocating cultural norm that left him and many other gay men drifting aimlessly during crucial times in their lives when larger-than-life role models would have been beneficial.
Have there been advancements in how gay characters are treated in Hollywood movies? Well, Brokeback Mountain had the most Oscar nominations of any film in 2005, but lost to Crash in the Best Picture category.” Eleven years later, Moonlight, a film about the struggles of a black, gay man, won Best Picture.
“There’s still a stereotype problem,” Hanrahan told me in a phone interview. “TV has come farther than film,” he admitted, “but until we get a gay Tom Cruise-type character that stands for something other than being gay, we’ll still lag behind.”
There’s no doubt Hanrahan was angry when he wrote many of the poems in Safer Behind Popcorn. And can you blame him—when we have to rely on the U.S. Supreme Court in 2020 to affirm that the 1964 Civil Rights Act prohibits discrimination against gay and transgender workers!
In the book, Hanrahan often vents about the indignities gay men like himself face in a world where heterosexuality is prized as the norm. A huge film buff, Hanrahan uses movies as the backdrop for many poems that call attention to discrimination—or just plain nonexistence.
In the opening poem “Film Noir You,” the poet takes old Hollywood to task for its narrow-minded treatment of gay actors and characters. He writes:
you thought
my eye was on the fop
sweat I knew he would not
make it to the final
reel since directors are
convinced pansies are so
evil
The writing style Hanrahan employs here—short sentences with no punctuation—creates a breathless, frenzied energy that almost feels like we’re swept up in a movie narrative.
Hanrahan writes that if Hollywood directors used more gay characters, their “wrists will tire of / soft angles” and that gays don’t sell well overseas, “taking our / morality from box / office receipts.”
He ends this poem about Hollywood’s gay cancel culture thusly:
Humphrey may
have had his own Paris
with me but in forty-
three we were denied black
and white reality
kept out of cinemas
escorted from backlots
with our genitals snipped
bleeding out without a
cause or a backstory
While reading Safer Behind Popcorn and researching many of the themes in the book, I came across a 2016 article in Out magazine titled “Decoding the Gay Subtext in the Hollywood Classic, The Maltese Falcon.”
In the poem “Humphrey,” Hanrahan touches on some of the themes discussed in the article, such as Bogart’s manliness, his effeminate co-stars, and the phallic nature of the Maltese falcon.
But in the end, the celluloid closet wins. “Homosexuality cannot survive the noir, a McGuffin / for bigots blinkered by the unfamiliar.” That line also is just one of the many beautiful poetic phrasings Hanrahan is capable of.
Hanrahan has a lot to complain about, given the bigoted behavior of society towards LGBTQ people. But the poet often shows his softer side as well.
The prose poem “Wishing You Were Here with Me” is a wonderful, sometimes bittersweet, ode to Hanrahan’s relationship with his grandfather. The poet notes that he was different from the other grandsons. Movies were his passion, rather than sports. But the sports movie, A League of Their Own, plays a pivotal role in the young poet’s life.
The poet is reminiscing decades after watching the movie with his grandfather. He writes: “A strange occurrence that a man from a Western / Pennsylvanian town could believe in me and / accept me even if he never fully understood why / I was so different from my local cousins, that I was so / different from everything he had ever encountered.”
The poet is confident, he writes, that his grandfather would have been his biggest champion had he “lived to see me come out.”
But while Hanrahan and his grandfather were bonding, the poet still lacked a language to get him through “jock hero” crushes in high school. He had to keep his distance from his man-crush because he couldn’t even articulate how he felt. “Hollywood / hadn’t invented a language, just some vague actors hanging / around the edges of John Hughes’ films.”
The ease with which Hanrahan weaves in and out of movie metaphors is impressive. Not only are people in his life connected to specific movies, but also the filter with which he views the world is intimately connected to movie making.
In “Supporting Actor,” for example, the poet writes about his uncle, who is dying of cancer: “We wrote each other / out of our screenplays, supporting actors / missing from the latter reels of the film”.
This poem also contains one of my favorite lines: “so many decades dissolve / like half-melted candy stuck in a cluttered glovebox.”
Another good line comes from the poem “The Pansy and the Maid,” where Hanrahan rails against the movie-making Production Code that limited screen exposure for black and fey characters. “They need to be assuaged our / light loafers won’t pinch heroic toes.”
And this gem from “The Sword in the Stone”:
Then, I’ll pull a rusted
sword from the stone
my heart has become,
petrified from accumulated death.
Hanrahan is originally from Virginia, and has lived in Washington, DC, and New York City on his way to Philadelphia, where he currently resides. In 2018, he published the chapbook, Hardened Eyes on the Scan (Moonstone Press) and this spring, Toho Press published his chapbook, Gay Cake. He’s been published in anthologies and journals, and currently serves on the Moonstone Press Editorial Board, is head poetry editor for Toho Journal, and is an instructor for Green Street Poetry.
He told me that if it weren’t for reading Sylvia Plath while in high school, he wouldn’t be a poet today. Other poets that have influenced him include Sonia Sanchez, e.e. cummings, Mark Doty, Allen Ginsburg, and Frank O’Hara.
This is his first full-length collection of poetry and the scope is striking. Hanrahan takes us to Paris and Morocco, to Naples and New York City and beyond. His subjects span popular culture, including Johnny Depp, Luke Perry, Prince, Mel Gibson, Madonna, Wonder Woman, Oscar Wilde, Marylyn Monroe, and Jeff Daniels.
The last name, Jeff Daniels, appears in the poem “Egyptian Rose,” from which the book gets its title: “I wish Jeff Daniels would walk out / through the screen into my life. / He’s safer behind popcorn, though.”
One thing Hanrahan doesn’t do in Safer Behind Popcorn is play it safe. Knives are unsheathed as he skewers popular culture for turning its back on the LGBTQ community. But even at his most devastating, Hanrahan cannot conceal his love of Hollywood and movie making.
And he does so with a poetic energy that is fresh and evocative, with language that is carefully crafted and seemingly spontaneous, and with a reverence for art that leaves one salivating for a large bucket of buttered popcorn and a good movie.
