Learn From It

“When I was a boy, the only role models I had were Liberace and Charles Nelson Reilly. I couldn't play the piano and I wasn't much good at Match Game so I felt doomed. Now there are countless more images of gay people on television and I am grateful for every one of them, but they don't represent that many more options. The message I hear is that it's OK to be gay as long as you are effortlessly stylish, hysterically funny or both.”

[...]

“Over a decade ago I came out to my family at Thanksgiving. This year, as they pass the cranberry sauce, they're in for an even bigger surprise. I'm going back in. I'm not planning on breaking up with my partner of five years or even turning in my collection of Kylie Minogue dance mixes. I've just realized that being gay isn't what it used to be. Prime time [television] has done to homosexuality what Disney has done to Times Square. What was once decadent and expressive has become sanitized and boring.”

--Columnist PG Kain, Houston Chronicle, Nov. 25.

Taken from Rex Wockner's Quote Unquote feature.

Now, aren't these a couple of stupid little chestnuts?

Stupid on so many levels, and off in so many directions. I have to give Mr. Kain credit for such an economy of words. I should give him credit, too, for finding the cloud behind the silver lining, for snatching defeat from the jaws of victory, insult from the unforgiving jaws of a compliment.

For years, the gay powers-that-be have walked along the knife-edge, tossing around words like “marginalized” and “second-class” and have thus far managed to avoid cuts on their feet. It must be because we're all light in the loafers.

Seriously, how do they manage it? They're having their cake (“being marginalized sucks!”) and eating it, too (“remember when we were fabulous and mysterious and so out-there?”).

They're complaining, always complaining. Nothing is ever good enough. Forward motion is always in the wrong direction, progress wears the wrong colors, the heterosexual majority out there isn't coming along in the right kind of automobile.

What was it they expected? Because it certainly wasn't equality. It certainly wasn't integration. It certainly wasn't the certainty they expected.

I remember getting myself into some trouble with friends and others for simply enjoying the American version of Queer as Folk. It was shrill, they said. It was caricaturish. Didn't represent gays. Didn't give gay kids role models. Would give straight people the wrong idea.

Huh? I don't remember gay men getting pissy about Dynasty in the 80s.

And we're getting similar bitching about Queer Eye critics. I watched it a few times; I thought it was funny. And I thought it might be nice, if humorless, to have them (and their budget) brought to bear on my house and my wardrobe.

Why is it that pundits such as Mr. Kain can only paint the world with a giant brush? And why is it they think the world begins and ends with television shows? That the entire population of homosexuals moves as one and with perfect predictibility?

Straight people aren't stupid. The mainstream culture is not a uniformly beige wasteland. They're foreigners, people. They don't get gay culture because they are not of it. And why should they? Do most gay people honestly believe that because they aped straight culture that they, in fact, get it? I would not so presume, at least for myself.

Ironic that gay columnists behave like the broad cliché of the obtuse American when they proclaim that their world is the world.

Why don't they behave more like the Ideal Gay Culture they so fondly misremember?

Be daring. Be bold. Set out in new directions. Let them chase us if they so desire, but if they don't, who the fuck cares? Don't be anything at all “at large”. Be in the small. Be only the one. But expect, at every step, to be secure in basic rights, basic fairnesses. Integrate if you want, keep parts to yourself if you want. Or don't. Choose, don't complain about how other people look [down] upon you.

Didn't growing up in an atmosphere where normalcy was wielded like a weapon to make you behave complicitly—perhaps contrarily to your own desires—teach you anything?

Go back “in”, Mr. Kain, as if your saying such a thing doesn't lend credence to the arguments of mutability of sexuality (hey, someone might care).

I swear, every time we lurch forward towards equality, it's like the last-call lights have abruptly come up, and those too ossified, too rigid to embrace the dynamism of those who couldn't give a flying fuck about normalcy go scurrying into the corners like cockroaches, “inning” themselves (facetiously or otherwise), or retreating further into the good old days. You know, those good old days where the initial whiffs of bravery were traded in for whiffs of poppers, where most seemed to do whatever they liked, instead of liking what they did.

We have no leaders; we have pundits. We have whiners like Mr. Kain. We have people like Andrew Sullivan, using his pulpit as therapy. We do have well-thought, well-spoken folks like Mike Signorile, but he's no Protagonist, just an Intelligent Observer.

The old saying goes: “if you're not the lead dog, the view never changes.”

Trouble is, maybe too many people just want to keep looking at tail.