When I was a little kid, I used to watch with my brother when there was Macho Man and Hulk Hogan. But then I fell out of it for a few years.
With rare exceptions, Hollywood typically casts Spec Ops guys as macho, swaggering strongmen. As usual, Hollywood's got it wrong.
Guys want a 500 horsepower car. I'd rather have one horsepower - in a horse. That's macho. You go to pick up your date and you show up on a horse.
I've been fortunate. I've worked in a lot of things where I had those kinds of experiences with actors who were perceived as very macho guys, everybody from Lee Marvin to Charlie Bronson to Harrison Ford to Robert Shaw.
Contrary to the macho culture of Mexico, both my grandmothers were very brave young widows. I was always very close to these hard-working, intelligent women.
My dad's a beautiful man, but like a lot of Mexican men, or men in general, a lot of men have a problem with the balance of masculinity and femininity - intuition and compassion and tenderness - and get overboard with the macho thing. It took him a while to become more, I would say, conscious, evolved.
Tapping into a more masculine, macho culture, I got in touch with my femininity, but differently. Macho culture is also pride of the body and showing it off - a relationship to theatricality, to construction. It's about owning your narrative again.
Many of my favorite survivors in fiction show that it may not be the most muscled, macho or mighty people who pull through. A strong mind and body aren't always enough. You might also need a resilient heart.
It's an experience I'd like to add to the chorus, that these blue-collar, macho men, like my older brother, had the capacity to say: 'I don't care, I love you anyway.' There are young kids thinking: 'I'll never come out because it's too hard in our communities.' But I'm saying maybe your story can be similar to mine.
I went to a quite macho art school in the 1970s, and while everyone was making hulking big sculptures, I was making things out of bits of paper.
