Washington Post Staff Writer Thursday, April 27, 2000; Page C01 Buried deep in the Washington Blade – the gray lady of once-hip and urbane gay newspapers – there are still men seeking men the low-tech way, in the classified personal ads, which is quaint in the age of quick fixes and AOL chat rooms. The tiny type size hints at the shyness and discretion in yesteryear's closet. In there – among dozens of "outgoing" and "good-looking, fit" available bachelors who like "dancing" (who doesn't?) and "camping" (you mean Gore-Tex or "Valley of the Dolls"?) and "long walks" (you bet) with other like-minded guys who are "spiritually centered" (uh-oh) and "emotionally mature," and "hairy tops" and "butch bottoms" (eep) – comes this conspicuous howl from the great gay elsewhere: "I don't own a cat, all my houseplants are dead. . . . It's my hope that the friendship we build may someday grow into a future atypical relationship where hanging curtains, picking out china patterns & adopting poodles together & giving them human names are NOT our goals." That may be the crankiest, edgiest gay man in Washington, and he's too late. The Love That Dared Not Speak Its Name now yawns and checks its watch, as being gay becomes more market niche than rebellion. As humorist Fran Lebowitz put it: "Who are now the most square people on Earth? Who are the only people left who want to go into the Army and get married? Homosexuals." As gays and lesbians once again prepare to march on the Capitol Sunday, one thing seems clearer all the time: They're losing the last strains of fringe chic, the vive la diffe»rence that once made homosexuality cool. Now being gay is boring. Being gay is being Donna Reed. Gay men and lesbians, who never agreed on much, have laid claim to the white-picket-fence dream – God, country, Boy Scouts, bridal showers – in unison. The protest march ultimately led to one place, metaphorically. That place is Crate & Barrel. Ah, Crate & Barrel, on a Sunday afternoon in spring, in Pentagon City, so filled with insurgent possibilities. The shopping mall, not the National Mall, is the pulse point of gay male America. (You want the lesbian view, we'll swing by Home Depot on the way back.) We watch stealthily as two gay men argue about wine glasses. (You ask: How do you know they're gay? Please. It's not 1983 anymore. It's the uniform – the plaid shirt tucked into the jeans just so, the Ricky Martinish haircut; the Abercrombie-Zombie look. It's like that recent New Yorker cartoon, the one with the old lady in the grocery store eyeing two identical, black T-shirted, shaved-bald, goateed lovers, and one says to her, "No, we are not twins.") Clearly they're acting radically – buying themselves the wedding presents they never got. How handy it would be to read too much into their story, to reconstruct a narrative that plucks them, leather chaps and all, off pride parade floats or brings them, blinking, out of the pretty-boy disco dungeons into the sunshine. To have them meet and fall in love at Gay Bingo Night at the parish hall; to chart their survival through the AIDS epidemic, and figure when and where politics and the dreaded "gay agenda" ceased to matter anymore. But instead we stand there, spying, in complete shock: They're buying that lamp? That plain, sad lamp that says nothing except conformity, and even then whispers it? A Movement Splintered The buzz around this year's Millennium March on Washington doesn't tout glitter or pageantry. It boasts the addition of a "family area" with activities for the kids; it tells you where to rent a baby stroller. The mildest spectrum of gay and gay-friendly show bizzies have been brought in to perform: power couple Ellen DeGeneres and Anne Heche, k.d. lang, Whoopi Goldberg and Pet Shop Boys, who once sang, in a club hit, "We were never being boring . . ." when, in fact, they were. So whatever happened to gay edge? It's done, girlfriend. Don't ask your hilarious cousin if the purse goes with the shoes, unless you're talking Banana Republic. What about bold, new gay theater? Aside from a one-man show about a maitre d', it's asleep, out of subjects – even the obits for musical theater have yellowed. Gay movies? Flattened by Hollywood – even Hilary Swank's stunning Best Actress turn in "Boys Don't Cry," as a small-town transsexual, had to be retooled as a sermonette on hate. Fashion? Acting straighter all the time, the jiggy purview of gangstas. What about Dykes on Bikes, the Leathermen of America, Queer Nation? Bogged down, it turns out, in parliamentary procedure. Even the Millennium March, by almost any account, has had a difficult time rallying the troops this year. Contrarians within the gay movement feel that the march organizers are too bossy, too doctrinaire; thousands more feel they've marched enough already. The old gay rebellion unraveled, which many read as the ultimate sign of victory for gay rights. A recent cover of Newsweek proclaimed what's "Gay Today" with a tailor-made assemblage of well-scrubbed, diverse homosexuals: a minister in robes, a soldier who is also a state lawmaker (a twofer!), a doctor, a teacher and a New York City police officer. It screams blah. Blah is bliss. Blah is just what the leading gay-rights advocates strive for in the new century, when triumphs are measured in sitcoms and the slow crawl of statehouse marriage and anti-discrimination initiatives. Even one of the most bawdy gay men in America, a 36-year-old syndicated advice columnist named Dan Savage – who for eight years has advised straight readers on the intricacies of kinky sex from a gay man's horse-sense perspective – has settled down with his boyfriend and adopted a son in a nice Seattle neighborhood. "What's wrong with being boring?" asks Savage, who plans to attend the Millennium March so he can write about what a symbolic failure he expects it to be. "The vast majority of people are boring and stupid and cheap," he says. "We told ourselves for a long time that because we were gay, we are somehow more with-it and urban and on the edge, so we believed it. It was Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and me. Oscar Wilde was one big messed-up queen in England, but guess what? There were a lot more, but they just weren't interesting." Ten years ago, when activists chanted "We're here, we're queer, get used to it," did they have any idea how "used to it" America would get? Visibility, it turns out, is bland. TV's "Will & Grace" – a gay lawyer and his straight gal-pal – have pajama parties and gab about boyfriend prospects, although it remains to be seen whether NBC can bestow on Will an actual sex life. In other news, lesbian rock goddess Melissa Etheridge and her partner, Julie Cypher, build a toddler dynasty from David Crosby's folk/rock-hero sperm. Meanwhile, the movement's true anti-heroes are those iconoclasts in navy-blue suits, the Log Cabin Republicans, whose love for the GOP goes, to the amusement of outside observers, comically unrequited. What everyone gay now realizes is this: The movement has grown and splintered in a thousand directions. It is soberly governed by national boards and associations of something or other. Many of these organizations are Beltway-based, requiring significant fund-raising and multi-pronged, hypersensitive mission statements. Someone has always just resigned from one of these boards in a snit. The Rainbow Herd To be gay now is to live under the rainbow windsock, submitting to a stringent, self-imposed regimen of gay icons, products, slogans and the mind-numbing history of gaydom. The modern experience of coming out of the closet has been funneled down to a prescribed set of rituals involving a blase soundtrack of disco anthems (gay and straight Americans alike now grow up knowing how to dance to "YMCA"), a few white tank-top T-shirts, some boots, some unhappy Thanksgiving dinners with the family, a regrettable tattoo, some poetry scribbled in journals. The majority of gay people do not get pummeled or fired or expelled; they emerge a wee bit neurotic and immediately set about shopping. ("I just bought my boyfriend a new car," boasts a smiling blond stud in a suit in a recent ad in the Advocate, a gay magazine. He "was even more shocked by the deal G&L Internet Bank gave me than he was the day he met my ex-wife!") There are ubiquitous "Hate Is Not a Family Value" refrigerator magnets, rainbow stickers in the shape of a cat, gay-power credit cards endorsed by Martina Navratilova. The gay-book market, ranging from cookbooks to kids' books, is glutted with memoirs and dyke detective stories and how-to titles like "Speaking Out: 425 Gay Men Explain It All to You" and "The History of Lesbian Hair." "No one has ever gone broke overestimating the insecurity of the gay consumer," says Dan Savage. "It's horrifying. The rainbow has become the gay version of the Mud-Flap Girl." When Ellen DeGeneres decided to come out as a lesbian on her ABC sitcom, all of gaydom was required to tune in as if she were the first lesbian to walk on the moon. What happened afterward was interesting: Lesbians and gay men saw the eventual cancellation of "Ellen" as a matter of network oppression. Only a few were willing to admit that Ellen was actually more funny as a bumbling Lucille-Ball-in-the-closet. Once Ellen came out, ratings dwindled because her issue-oriented lesbianism was dull. "It's absolutely shameful to say, because visibility has so many benefits, but there is something interesting that comes out of oppression and being out on the fringe that almost can't be mass-marketed," says Alexandra Chasin, author of "Selling Out: The Gay and Lesbian Movement Goes to Market." "It's true that I may have suffered as a child from not seeing more gay and lesbian images on television," Chasin says. "But it also meant the field was wide open." Today the field is well trod. When she wrote "Selling Out," Chasin spent years examining the growing gay niche market and found that it tends to make outcasts of those homosexuals who don't meet code. "A lot of ads are 'gay vague.' It's sanitized, and very unchallenging on the level of gender norms," Chasin says. "Often what we see are images of disproportionately white people, who are not too young or not too old, and always healthy. A certain kind of composite picture begins to emerge that unfortunately comes to stand for being gay." Railing against advertising is nothing new except that the original spark of gay life, supposedly, was to do everything differently. The drag queen, useful only as a court jester to mainstream gays, hasn't been marketed to or recognized because s/he doesn't wield enough dollar power. Ethnic minorities also get left out of the rosy gay picture-frame (except as exotic sex objects). Ugly gays and lesbians don't exist at all. "Radical objectives," Chasin says, "that made [gay men and lesbians] different from the straight community are lost." So poorly mistreated in high school, so self-styled as sexual rebels, it's odd to learn that gay people tend to fiercely create and adhere to an almost nationalistic rainbow herd. "I get super-depressed about it sometimes," Chasin says. "It's not for me to second-guess where happiness resides, but what happens is when we willfully conform to mainstream practices, then queer people who are less like the mainstream are still excluded, are still discriminated against. The lines just get redrawn." She's also disturbed by recent mergers of the biggest gay media outlets: Out magazine was bought by the Advocate, and a month later they were both acquired by PlanetOut, a Web site that makes being gay look like a college brochure. What could be more boring than a media conglomerate? Then again, "What could be more boring than to still be referring to yourself as 'queer'?" asks writer Andrew Sullivan, who rose to prominence as a conservative, reasoned gay voice in the queer noise of the 1990s, arguing in his book "Virtually Normal" that the real revolution resides in the mundane details of plain living. We called Sullivan two days after his big story on testosterone ran in the New York Times Magazine, where, early in his treatise on chemical manliness, we learn that Sullivan spanked his beagle in a public park after he (Sullivan, not the dog) received an injection of testosterone. Yipe-yipe! But anyway, back to gay politics: "What's finished is far-left politics," Sullivan says. "It's far more radical right now to be a reform rabbi [a group who, as of last month, officially support gay partnerships] than to be a member of the Lesbian Avengers. It's more radical to settle down and get married than to be a gay activist." The thrill is gone, which to some is itself thrilling – a chance to finally peel the rainbow sticker off the Jetta and be done with it. Undergay and Undersexed You know it's over when straight people are feeling hopelessly undergay. Talk magazine asserts that today's straight woman is looking for a stylish mate who is heterosexual but "just gay enough." Examples? Jude Law, Matt Damon, Edward Norton, Scott Wolf. In other words, men who know from designer goods but aren't actually designers. To catch up, you can take gay/lesbian/bisexual/transgender history in college now, and not just at the small, left-leaning schools. A University of Michigan class offers, in its fall 2000 course catalogue, "How to Be Gay: Male Homosexuality and Initiation," some remedial fare for the young gay student who can't tell his Oscar Wilde from his Harvey Milk. (Synopsis: The night Judy Garland died in 1969, a bunch of drag queens freaked out and fought the cops in front of the Stonewall, a Greenwich Village bar. Later, Ellen DeGeneres was on the cover of Time. There'll be a quiz.) And hey, what about sex? We're sad to report, after heaps of field research, that the really wild sex seems to be gone, a casualty not of disease but perhaps of politics. In pushing anti-discrimination laws, lesbians and gay men have learned to avoid the subject of sex, speaking of it only in the abstract. Lesbian-engineered sex toys have gone suburban, the way of the Tupperware party. The few remaining queer activists bemoan the fact that no one wants to stand by the giant papier-mache penis at the pride parades anymore; in fact, no one brings the giant penis to the parade anymore. The gay men who show up in furniture and Volkswagen commercials seem to never have sex. They took the advice of the twangy-voiced opposition: What yew dew in yer own bedroom, etc. The only person who still thinks lesbian sex is interesting is Howard Stern. The only people still preoccupied with gay male sex are the ones waving "God Hates Fags" posters in front of the statehouse, forever transfixed by the clinical details of sodomy, looking as anachronistic as the white people who yelled at black school kids. The big, bad gay bathhouses? They look like health clubs now. The dens of iniquity? They advertise on their own Web pages. The porn industry? It's gone totally corporate. Marching Ahead Even takin' it to the streets has lost its allure. The Millennium March on Washington, organized by the D.C.-based Human Rights Campaign and a network of gay churchgoers, with the word "gay" as a subtitle and a $1.8‚million operating budget, has endured an array of criticisms and boycotts. Counter-activists say the gay/lesbian/bisexual/transgender (such a mouthful) communities are, simply, done with marching. Accusations of racial and cultural insensitivity abound; the transgendered feel maligned; the goals were uncertain and debatable. (Organizers eventually compromised on eight wordy issues for a mission statement, with the emphasis on marriage, hate-crime protection, health concerns such as AIDS and breast cancer, anti-discrimination laws, military service and a catch-all platform of racial/social justice.) But those complaints seem to be sideshows. The most stinging criticism of the march is that it has become a tedious chore. There is a sense of having lost a certain cha-cha-cha. "No one is signing up for the Millennium March. People are voting with their feet," says Michael Warner, a Rutgers University professor who wrote a provocative and unpopular screed last year called "The Trouble With Normal," in which he argues that gay marriage is a distraction not worth marching for. Being so off-message, his book was promptly ignored by the gay press and gay bookstores – its best shot at readership. But Warner is undaunted. "This 1950s version of how gay life should be that we've been handed is actually not making a lot of people happy, which is the only thing that gives me hope," he says. "The Millennium March is just a fund-raiser groping for a theme. The people who have put themselves in charge have wedded themselves so earnestly to the idea of a happy gay and lesbian identity – they seem determined to make gay life as boring as it can possibly be." Facing such critics and an uncertain turnout, it's a nice surprise to find that the mood of the Millennium March offices, just up 16th Street from the White House, is jovial, upbeat and busy. "Gay rights is a marathon movement, not a sprint," says Dianne Hardy-Garcia, executive director of the Millennium March. Hardy-Garcia, a Texas lobbyist and gay rights advocate, was brought in last fall, when the march seemed dangerously close to becoming a disorganized disaster. "This movement lasts years," she says. "I think people forget that. I go to a meeting and get excited that there are 200 people there; then I go to a bar and there are 2,500 people there every night. If that isn't a slap in the face‚. . ." The gay bar is still the central focus of gay life. March organizers have done a lot of their grass-roots work there, shaking hands, passing out buttons and flyers, shouting over Cher to be heard. Hardy-Garcia admits that at times the movement feels redundant, but she reminds her critics that, in an election year, there are serious setbacks that should boil the blood of any gay activist. If this sounds boring to the just-gay-enough modern homosexual, Hardy-Garcia doesn't want to hear it. If gays feel disenfranchised from the clean, perky images the Millennium March is working so hard to present, "My response is, 'So try, dammit.' Get out there and work. Our work is not done. Our movement is not over." The Fun Is Done But something's over. Michael Warner won't be marching this year, since he's not interested in the Army or the Boy Scouts. When he feels "despair," he goes to New York and hangs out with drag queens and the transgendered fabulous. He likes the queens; they keep him on that beguiling edge that he first identified with as a young gay man. "It reminds me what it's all really about," Warner says. "Transgender activism is finally finding its own voice, and they're not happy to just be the 't' stuck on the end of GLBT." Warner can't be blamed: Spend too much time reading about gay politics and you, too, will want to run screaming to a bar. When not raising a toddler and writing sex advice, Dan Savage tries to revert to the prankish ways of yore. On assignment for Salon magazine, Savage "infiltrated" Gary Bauer's doomed GOP presidential bid and purported to lick the campaign office doorknobs with his flu-tainted saliva. It wasn't surprising that it caused an uproar among conservatives; what was surprising was seeing Savage get savaged by official gay spokespeople. He finally admitted he'd only licked the doorknobs allegorically. The episode spoke volumes: The fun is done. "Gay culture is boring because gay culture is going away," Savage says. "And gay culture is going away because the oppression is going away. I think that's a pretty fair trade." |
