"I can acshually shing, ya know!"
At what cost freedom? This concept is weighing heavily on our mind lately. In a recent Advocate article titled "Losing Dorothy Parker", writer and musical theater enthusiast Joel Derfner wonders aloud what will become of gay culture now that a version of gay culture is put more and more on display in the daily lives of Americans from one end of the country to the other. You'd probably be hard-pressed to find even a member of Wasilla, Alaska's Assembly of God who has not sat casually on the couch at one time or another taking in a Bravo reality show(and let's be serious... Bravo, as far as ordinary Americans are concerned, is the gay network).
There is a transwoman engaged in an affair with a Baldwin brother weekly on network television. Ellen Degeneres has recovered from the heavy-handed lesbification that imploded her sitcom to become the second most-watched talk show host in the country who just married her TV star girlfriend in a California-approved ceremony. The sort of homo-hugging fag haggery that Madonna pioneered in the 80's is now de rigeur for a whole generation of stars. Lindsay Lohan is now officially in a lesbian relationship(we remain not entirely convinced that she is really a lesbian, her new enthusiasm for flannel aside) with a soft butch celebrity DJ that we've all known about forever anyway. We've known about it forever because they've been everywhere with it for months, doing everything short of reenacting Gina Gershon and Jennifer Tilly's love scenes from Bound. It has also been reported on, almost daily, by raging gay gossip bogger Perez Hilton. Both Hilton and comedian Kathy Griffin have been calling for American Idol runner-up Clay Aiken to come out of the closet since what seems like the dawn of time. This week he finally answered their prayers on the cover of a national magazine. Griffin and Hilton are currently in search of new punchlines.
We are, of a fashion, literally everywhere. We cannot be ignored, we are certainly visible and yet there are those of us who remain unable to celebrate. Now, as in days not long past, for every 'mo caught up in the rapture of increased visibility and tenuous "acceptance" there are those of us who remain suspicious of what this means to our gay sensibility, culture and largely underwritten history. Generations of information, passed down hand over hand like scrolls written in invisible ink, unreadable by heteronormative eyes, seems in danger of being lost. The more we become absorbed into mainstream society the more we may come to resemble it and the implications of this phenomenon are manifold. The question now is not only what we might gain but also what might we lose.
Unlike, say, African-Americans our history is not much discussed in public schools, even for one month out of the year. As a result, gay experience for the non-gay is almost always seen only in the context of the moment. Concurrently, while we appear on screens of all sizes in increasing numbers, we are most often to be found not in scripted programs that may attempt to flesh out the gay experience in a genuine way but in reality TV where everyone, gay and straight, are presented on the most unreal, exaggerated cartoon plane of existence. Young people watching Queer Eye for the Straight Guy don't think about the Stonewall riots or Harvey Milk in the same way that watching Barack Obama campaign for the presidency might bring to mind images of Dr. King or abolition. To borrow from Darby Crash's page in tragic gay history: what we do, who we are and where we have come from truly is secret because our history is not on anyone's agenda but our own. Ever. It has always been thus and we suspect it will remain so for decades(if not centuries) to come.
In the past when gay culture was not wired into millions of homes backed by billions of dollars in advertising money, the curious had to seek it out. We learned gay culture from books, films and actual real live gay people. We also made it up as we went along, shifting its shape to suit new environments and changing times and tastes. There is a richness in that experience that cannot be gleaned from the shallow, dumbed-down gayness that will be sold to future generations. Older generations will always fade away as new ones rise up to enjoy their moment in the sun. All anyone can do is continue to speak of the invisible legacy of the past that made the present opportunities possible. One can only hope our words do not fall on deaf ears.
