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Friday, May 04, 2007
The Gay Thing
"The" Gay Guy, Oscar Wilde
"The" Gay Guy, Oscar Wilde
BRITS.42.13-15. I
just got off the phone with my sort-of-stepdaughter Monica, the
beautiful blonde motorhead
who is presently majoring in art history at
one of New Jersey's better state universities. I'd called to ask her
about this, a blog
post written by a young woman who is clearly agonizing about the
complications of trying to date straight men while hanging out with gay
guys she describes as 'best friends.' I figured Monica would be able to
tell me about life in the new world that's been created by the unending
celebration of all things gay by the MSM. I wanted her insight about
the kind of women who prefer to associate with gay men and therefore
face the same kind of emotional ordeal described by "petitedov." What
Monica told me will come as a complete shock to Andrew Sullivan, though
not, I expect, to other old geezers like myself.
Monica said the only place she had ever seen women who favored the company of gay guys was in the movies. Despite majoring in art history, she'd encountered only one openly gay guy in any of her classes. She expressed the opinion that the gay lifestyle we've all been hearing so much about seemed to her a fiction created by the mass media. Then she changed the subject. She was finishing up her take-home final on Esthetics, and she told me she'd marry her professor if he wasn't already spoken for. Apparently, his ears stick out in an interesting way you'd have to be Monica to appreciate.
Rather than think about Professor Jughead's ears, I found myself thinking about the whole gay thing. Is it possible we've been sold a bill of goods by the Andrew Sullivans of the world? Yes. In fact, I'm pretty sure we have been. So here's a point of view you don't hear that much about. If you're gay, it's going to be kind of a bummer, but sometimes that's the way life is. You'll get over it. Eventually.
I went to an all-boys prep school, back in the notorious sixties. There were close to 500 students enrolled at any given time. We read the prep school novels, of course, but it always came as a surprise how many of them had some sort of homosexual theme. The truth of our daily lives was starkly different. Of the 500 who shared the same prison, approximately 497 spent all their waking, and sleeping, hours thinking about having sex with females. The other three were known by name and, quite cruelly, by incredibly specific anecdote. They were bullied, derided, laughed at -- I'm not boasting, just reporting -- and sometimes viciously persecuted.
These days, they call it homophobia and attribute it to some strain of sexual insecurity widely interpreted as an endorsement of the naturalness, and pervasiveness, of homosexual desires. In my recollections, that's just so much horseshit. Maybe 10 or 20 of the 500 were what we'd all recognize as homophobic today. They went out of their way to make life miserable for the 'queers.' But everybody else was largely indifferent, not hostile but provokable. What they didn't want was being asked to imagine what homosexuals did with each other in private. Stay away from that subject -- the one that engendered irrational disgust -- and they were perfectly willing to pretend there was nothing fatally different about the three odd ones in the student body. The mundane truth of the matter is that while teenage boys are in many ways indistinguishable from animals (don't ask about room hygiene, for example), they're also mostly decent human beings who prefer to live and let live.
That's why my own personal response to the gay rights agenda has been to remain mostly silent. College was a good deal bigger than my prep school, so I came to know gay guys who were uncloseted and perversely proud of their difference from the rest of us. I developed one rule in response. Gay friends were fine one-on-one. Just don't go to gay parties. When they sense they're in the majority, or at critical mass, their personalities change. They become sibilant, aggressive, imitation females, predatory sissies. The friend you thought you knew becomes a cartoonish stranger, prancing and strutting and lisping like the world's worst caricature of Oscar Wilde.
It's not that such scenes are threatening. They're not. What they are is boring. To see a bunch of men turn into a bunch of undesirable women is an oxymoron -- a disgusting bore. Oscar Wilde would have been a delight to meet. He was in all probability the wittiest man who ever lived. But put a bunch of gay guys together and all you get is the gay equivalent of an Elvis convention -- a hundred low-grade Tom, Dick, and Harry versions of the long dead and defiled original.
I forget which brilliant essayist it was who pointed out the irony of the word 'gay' as a label for homosexuals. If you've ever been to one of their parties you know they're not gay at all. They're not spontaneously joyful and larkish. Their hilarity and thuddingly relentless wittiness are forced things, determined, staged, and almost hysterical reactions to what is evidently a fervid self-hatred.
I'd like for them to be free of all that. Hence the silence. But the current lionization of homosexuality as an 'alternate lifestyle' forces me to speak up. This is not a lifestyle you'd wish on your worst enemy. Combine the native promiscuity of the human male with sexual quarry consisting of -- TA DA -- other human males, and you have just created a recipe for fatal unintended consequences. Yes, men are brilliantly creative and ambitious. That's exactly why they need women to keep them from running off the rails into premature self-immolation. Child-bearing issues aside, no 'gay' culture could build a civilization before it perished of sensual and self-hating excess.
It's been said that the Marx Brothers became geniuses because of the Hays office, which forced them to be brilliant rather than blue. The unexpurgated Marx Brothers would be mostly boring today -- not pornographic enough for our jaded tastes and not nearly witty enough to rival the divine Oscar. Sad to say, the same principle can be applied to today's gay culture. They're pitifully desperate for attention, and validation, and approval, but in insisting -- as they do -- that we imagine in vivid detail what they do behind once closed doors, they are insisting that we abandon our native, thoughtless toleration in favor of the pure disgust -- and, yes, boredom -- most people feel for a kind of sexuality exhibited by no more than 2 percent of the population. For 98 percent of us, sexual excitement lies in the otherness of our partners, not the sameness. Yet it's part of the peculiar blindness of homosexuals that they're convinced all of us secretly lust after body parts we can all see simply by peering into our own underwear. Does it get any more boring than that? The tantalizing wonder of the Kama Sutra reducced to, well, masturbation in a mirror. Homosexuals are the ulitmate narrow-minded clerks of erotica. No wonder they're less than 2 percent of the population.
It's an incredibly tiny minority. And right now, they're overplaying their hand. All that talk about Brokeback Mountain as a breakthrough production was a joke. There's a whole channel, LOGO, devoted to homosexual movies. Guess what? They're broadcasting 24/7. Gay producers, gay directors, gay actors, gay screenplays. Every day. All day. Is there a Jewish channel? No. But a gay channel is somehow an ACLU-granted right. Gays and their outraged claims make them more visible than Jews (also 2 percent of the U.S. population) in an age when most of the world wants Jews to die and homosexuals to redecorate their apartments. The creative presumptions of homosexuals have made them over-represented in the entertainment fare we routinely receive. What they simply cannot understand is that the increasingly explicit dramas they force upon us are counterproductive. The worst thing they can possibly do is rub our noses in the unpleasant oxymoron they refuse to recognize -- that we can tolerate them only as long they don't force our submerged disgust to the surface and make of our benign boredom an actual event to be dealt with.
Oscar Wilde is dead. He wasn't boring. The rest of you are. Really. God's honest tuth. If you don't believe me, ask Monica.
Monica said the only place she had ever seen women who favored the company of gay guys was in the movies. Despite majoring in art history, she'd encountered only one openly gay guy in any of her classes. She expressed the opinion that the gay lifestyle we've all been hearing so much about seemed to her a fiction created by the mass media. Then she changed the subject. She was finishing up her take-home final on Esthetics, and she told me she'd marry her professor if he wasn't already spoken for. Apparently, his ears stick out in an interesting way you'd have to be Monica to appreciate.
Rather than think about Professor Jughead's ears, I found myself thinking about the whole gay thing. Is it possible we've been sold a bill of goods by the Andrew Sullivans of the world? Yes. In fact, I'm pretty sure we have been. So here's a point of view you don't hear that much about. If you're gay, it's going to be kind of a bummer, but sometimes that's the way life is. You'll get over it. Eventually.
I went to an all-boys prep school, back in the notorious sixties. There were close to 500 students enrolled at any given time. We read the prep school novels, of course, but it always came as a surprise how many of them had some sort of homosexual theme. The truth of our daily lives was starkly different. Of the 500 who shared the same prison, approximately 497 spent all their waking, and sleeping, hours thinking about having sex with females. The other three were known by name and, quite cruelly, by incredibly specific anecdote. They were bullied, derided, laughed at -- I'm not boasting, just reporting -- and sometimes viciously persecuted.
These days, they call it homophobia and attribute it to some strain of sexual insecurity widely interpreted as an endorsement of the naturalness, and pervasiveness, of homosexual desires. In my recollections, that's just so much horseshit. Maybe 10 or 20 of the 500 were what we'd all recognize as homophobic today. They went out of their way to make life miserable for the 'queers.' But everybody else was largely indifferent, not hostile but provokable. What they didn't want was being asked to imagine what homosexuals did with each other in private. Stay away from that subject -- the one that engendered irrational disgust -- and they were perfectly willing to pretend there was nothing fatally different about the three odd ones in the student body. The mundane truth of the matter is that while teenage boys are in many ways indistinguishable from animals (don't ask about room hygiene, for example), they're also mostly decent human beings who prefer to live and let live.
That's why my own personal response to the gay rights agenda has been to remain mostly silent. College was a good deal bigger than my prep school, so I came to know gay guys who were uncloseted and perversely proud of their difference from the rest of us. I developed one rule in response. Gay friends were fine one-on-one. Just don't go to gay parties. When they sense they're in the majority, or at critical mass, their personalities change. They become sibilant, aggressive, imitation females, predatory sissies. The friend you thought you knew becomes a cartoonish stranger, prancing and strutting and lisping like the world's worst caricature of Oscar Wilde.
It's not that such scenes are threatening. They're not. What they are is boring. To see a bunch of men turn into a bunch of undesirable women is an oxymoron -- a disgusting bore. Oscar Wilde would have been a delight to meet. He was in all probability the wittiest man who ever lived. But put a bunch of gay guys together and all you get is the gay equivalent of an Elvis convention -- a hundred low-grade Tom, Dick, and Harry versions of the long dead and defiled original.
I forget which brilliant essayist it was who pointed out the irony of the word 'gay' as a label for homosexuals. If you've ever been to one of their parties you know they're not gay at all. They're not spontaneously joyful and larkish. Their hilarity and thuddingly relentless wittiness are forced things, determined, staged, and almost hysterical reactions to what is evidently a fervid self-hatred.
I'd like for them to be free of all that. Hence the silence. But the current lionization of homosexuality as an 'alternate lifestyle' forces me to speak up. This is not a lifestyle you'd wish on your worst enemy. Combine the native promiscuity of the human male with sexual quarry consisting of -- TA DA -- other human males, and you have just created a recipe for fatal unintended consequences. Yes, men are brilliantly creative and ambitious. That's exactly why they need women to keep them from running off the rails into premature self-immolation. Child-bearing issues aside, no 'gay' culture could build a civilization before it perished of sensual and self-hating excess.
It's been said that the Marx Brothers became geniuses because of the Hays office, which forced them to be brilliant rather than blue. The unexpurgated Marx Brothers would be mostly boring today -- not pornographic enough for our jaded tastes and not nearly witty enough to rival the divine Oscar. Sad to say, the same principle can be applied to today's gay culture. They're pitifully desperate for attention, and validation, and approval, but in insisting -- as they do -- that we imagine in vivid detail what they do behind once closed doors, they are insisting that we abandon our native, thoughtless toleration in favor of the pure disgust -- and, yes, boredom -- most people feel for a kind of sexuality exhibited by no more than 2 percent of the population. For 98 percent of us, sexual excitement lies in the otherness of our partners, not the sameness. Yet it's part of the peculiar blindness of homosexuals that they're convinced all of us secretly lust after body parts we can all see simply by peering into our own underwear. Does it get any more boring than that? The tantalizing wonder of the Kama Sutra reducced to, well, masturbation in a mirror. Homosexuals are the ulitmate narrow-minded clerks of erotica. No wonder they're less than 2 percent of the population.
It's an incredibly tiny minority. And right now, they're overplaying their hand. All that talk about Brokeback Mountain as a breakthrough production was a joke. There's a whole channel, LOGO, devoted to homosexual movies. Guess what? They're broadcasting 24/7. Gay producers, gay directors, gay actors, gay screenplays. Every day. All day. Is there a Jewish channel? No. But a gay channel is somehow an ACLU-granted right. Gays and their outraged claims make them more visible than Jews (also 2 percent of the U.S. population) in an age when most of the world wants Jews to die and homosexuals to redecorate their apartments. The creative presumptions of homosexuals have made them over-represented in the entertainment fare we routinely receive. What they simply cannot understand is that the increasingly explicit dramas they force upon us are counterproductive. The worst thing they can possibly do is rub our noses in the unpleasant oxymoron they refuse to recognize -- that we can tolerate them only as long they don't force our submerged disgust to the surface and make of our benign boredom an actual event to be dealt with.
Oscar Wilde is dead. He wasn't boring. The rest of you are. Really. God's honest tuth. If you don't believe me, ask Monica.
