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The Gay Man as Magical Elf was such a widespread (if tricky) part of self-patronization that by now you would expect the chill members of the gay community to respond with cool indifference to the question of anybody else’s gayness. Even now, however, the sweet and smiley and sexually unthreatening elf with liberal values and a positive attitude is supposed to transform everyone into noble gay-loving protectors—again, as long as the gay in question toes the party line, isn’t messy or too sexual, negative or angry and offers no contradictions and is certainly not conservative or Christian. Sanctimonious voices in the media, straight and gay alike, tell us that all gay people should be canonized as long as they share the same uniform values—speak like this, express themselves within this range, only believe in this, only support this, vote for this. (The angry and funny and outspoken pop star Morrissey is an anomaly, calling out contradictions and hypocrisies in society yet he always seems to be chastised by the press and on social media because he’s speaking honestly and doesn’t buy into the accepted narrative of the Applebee’s Gay.) The corporate heralding of gayness has always felt alienating to some of us: the upbeat press release, the smiling mask to assure us everything’s awesome. The gay man who comes out and doesn’t want to represent the status quo, and doesn’t feel like part of a homogenized gay culture or even rejects it and refuses to be a likable role model—in other words, the disappearing rebel—seems to have gone missing in society. The gay men who made crude jokes about other gays on social media, or who expressed their hopelessness when Modern Family was rewarded for its depiction of a gay couple and the heterosexual playing the most simpering queen on TV won Emmys for it, they’re either AWOL or severely underrepresented. Gay dudes who reject the cult of likability by remaining real and flawed simply aren’t what the gatekeepers of gay culture necessarily want. But it’s not what the gatekeepers of any culture seem to want now, either.
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In April 2013 I was invited to the GLAAD (Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation) media awards by one of my agents. The agency had bought a table and she asked me to be her date. Bill Clinton was being celebrated that evening, which I immediately thought was bizarre since Clinton signed DOMA, the Defense of Marriage Act, and implemented Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell but then I remembered that GLAAD had also honored Brett Ratner the year after he’d (innocuously, I thought) jokingly told the moderator during a Q&A after a screening of one of his movies that “rehearsal is for fags” and was forced to repent. When I accepted the invitation I had no idea that GLAAD harbored any resentment toward me as someone who occasionally expressed his distaste for stereotypical Hollywood representations in transgressive language on his Twitter account. In fact, GLAAD had nominated The Rules of Attraction as movie of the year in 2003; it lost to The Hours, where (of course) a tormented gay man with AIDS commits suicide by throwing himself out of a window in front of Meryl Streep. In Rules, a cool-with-being-gay college student (played by Ian Somerhalder) falls in love with the campus drug dealer and ladies’ man (James Van Der Beek) but is merely bummed out by his rejection. This should be too dumbly obvious to state—something one increasingly has to do in the current climate—but I’ve always supported gay rights. For anyone who’s gay it’s in your DNA to do so. I hadn’t, however, always tolerated how gay people have been portrayed in various media and had vented my distaste for this on Twitter. Since I knew a lot of gay men agreed with me—that gay men were represented in some kind of unending gay minstrel show in movies and on TV, often created by writers and producers who were gay themselves, or else were just conveniently ignored, and not a single Best Picture nominee in 2012 had a gay character in it—I assumed that the proud liberal community I supposedly belonged to was as inclusive as I was harmlessly critical. Hey, it’s a Twitter account, guys, move on. Certainly, in the spring of 2013 I hadn’t fucked up as many gay lives as Bill Clinton had.
Yet the day before the event my agent texted me that GLAAD was “furious” about a couple of tweets I’d posted over the last few years, and that because of them, my invitation had been withdrawn. I was sitting in a theater with my boyfriend of four years and about to watch a matinee of Oblivion, starring Tom Cruise (I won’t get into the layers of gay irony here) as the agent sent me part of GLAAD’s email to her along with their “instructions” and saying that they hoped I wasn’t “disappointed.” And I was a little disappointed, at first, but after thinking it through, I can’t say I was surprised, considering how literal-minded and irony-free GLAAD seemed to a lot of us. The “instructions” also requested that I wouldn’t go public or tweet about their decision to disinvite me and suggested, as they often do with anyone who has somehow “transgressed” the GLAAD rules of humorless social etiquette, that I have a “sit down” with them. I could only think, Where in the hell were we—gay elementary school? I apologized to my agent for any embarrassment this might have caused her and then started tweeting.
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In the late spring of 2013, a lot of gay people supported me after I tweeted about not being allowed to go to the GLAAD awards. It made news in certain circles, yet, in my view, it was GLAAD’s party and they could invite or disinvite anyone they wanted to. But, since its inception, the organization had been divisive within the community (as I myself had become, to some degree), and for all their good deeds, many considered them almost fascistically PC in confused ways: they preached tolerance but would quickly bitch-slap anybody who didn’t fall in stride with their agenda and ideology. The fact that GLAAD relentlessly bullied Alec Baldwin after he lashed out at paparazzi with gay slurs without ever acknowledging that he’d recently played an unstereotypical gay dude in Rock of Ages (a film directed by a gay man) and even had kissed Russell Brand on the mouth partly explains why he has never been a “traitor” to the community I belong to. The corporate-gay overreaction to Baldwin’s heated comments, namely the effort to falsely place Baldwin into a hate-speech narrative, was one of many reasons why I never wanted GLAAD to represent me in matters of cultural thought.
What GLAAD reinforces is the notion that gay men are oversensitive babies who need to be coddled and protected—not from the hideous anti-gay assaults in Russia, the Muslim world, China, or India, to name a few, but within domestic cultural sentiments. GLAAD was at the red-hot center for the creation of the magical elf as an absurdly high-minded and cutesy role model—hopefully a victim with great pecs—and had often applauded the stereotypes we saw paraded around in embarrassing queer movies and degrading retro sitcoms as “positive” simply because they were, um, gay. All the while they conveniently disregarded the truth, that a silent majority of gay men actively loathed and resisted the caricatures on display. (And no, GLAAD, they didn’t hate themselves—“self-hating” being the favorite pejorative aimed at any dissenters from the corporate directive.) Activists dive-bombing other gays who had simply expressed an opinion they didn’t like, or that didn’t lean toward their agenda, meant that their safe space, like the rest of the culture, had begun to exist on a fairly simplistic plane. A barbed observation—even remarks—tweeted by a gay man about other gay men in Hollywood and not directed at anyone became, in GLAAD’s new world order, hate speech.
When a community prides itself on its differences and its uniqueness and then bans people because of how they express themselves—not for acts of hate speech but simply because it doesn’t like their opinions—a corporate fascism has been put into play that ought to be seriously reconsidered, not just by GLAAD but by everyone. The problem a lot of my supporters had was simple: if you’re not the gay man as magical elf, you automatically run the risk of being ostracized by the elite gay community. And, anyway, what was GLAAD trying to protect by disinviting me? What statement were they making? We won’t tolerate tweets? We won’t invite someone we think is dickish? An organization holding an awards ceremony they claim represents all gays and yet also feeling they can choose which gays can and cannot be m
embers of the party is, on the face of it, ridiculous. The takeaway also seems simple: if you aren’t a happy homosexual comrade promoting what they define as acceptable values and pimping for GLAAD, you’re somehow defaming the cause. But what cause? Likability? Capitulation? That we all must be the same? That we all need to be actors? Later that spring, an openly gay director Facebooked me and said he agreed with much of what I’d tweeted—as did plenty of gay dudes in the industry, though a few said they would have worded things differently—and he, too, was especially aggravated to see gay men portrayed in entertainment as either victims or bitchy clowns or queeny best friends, though admittedly in 2013 at that point there were a few shows that balanced things out, with the evil Republican on Scandal and the slobby Max Blum on the short-lived Happy Endings. A gay TV writer said he also agreed with my tweets but couldn’t understand why I cared what middlebrow gays thought about anything.
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What threw GLAAD into a massive hissy fit had to do with tweets they assumed had proved that I believed gay actors couldn’t play straight roles, which was a misreading of the tweets. I only said that famously gay Matt Bomer, who is publicly married to his partner, a Hollywood publicist, seemed like a weird actor to push for the role of the very straight BDSM freako Christian Grey in the adaptation of Fifty Shades of Grey. I thought this because there was no way a corporate entity like Comcast-NBCUniversal was going to endanger what would become a billion-dollar franchise by selecting an actor who was easily and openly gay (an openness I wholeheartedly encourage and applaud, especially for anyone with leading-man looks working in a homophobic casting biz) and who carried any baggage that could distract from the heavy heterosexual fantasy of this particular movie. For example, in a key exchange at the very beginning Anastasia questions Christian’s sexuality and provokes his insulted denials—with Bomer in the role, this would become a very meta scene.
I thought this casting—already being advocated by a vocal faction on Twitter, many of whom apparently didn’t know Bomer was gay—would create a distraction by mixing up the public/private life of the actor with his role as a voracious heterosexual predator. I might have been wrong about this, I suppose, and maybe women wouldn’t need to reprocess the actor playing this role in order to surrender themselves to this fantasy, though the women I talked to almost unanimously said it would have made the movie even stranger and more remote for them. As a friend of a few actors who feel they can’t reveal their sexuality if they want to land certain parts, I knew that for Bomer coming out couldn’t have been easy and that my tweets might have been construed as bordering on insensitive, though that’s exactly what rationality and logic are now often considered in this everyone-is-a-victim culture. But on the other hand, I thought, So fucking what? It was simply an opinion. I wasn’t in any position to hire or reject Matt Bomer. I’d simply tweeted that I thought in this particular role there seemed to be a problem. And I disagreed with fans of his who argued that Bomer successfully played a married and straight male stripper in Steven Soderbergh’s Magic Mike, because I didn’t remember Matt in that movie at all except for the scene in which he ogled Alex Pettyfer while saying it was okay for him to screw his wife while he watched.
Ah, but tweeting that watching Glee was like “stepping into a puddle of HIV” and that Chris Colfer singing “Le Jazz Hot” gave me “the hivs” also outraged them. My HIV-positive friends as well as many other gay men I knew (and know) often made gallows jokes about HIV and AIDS, which helped to lessen some of the moralistic stigma surrounding the disease, and black humor always acts as a coping mechanism. If certain Hollywood liberals got pissed-off at the HIV jokes, weren’t they making HIV a moral and political concern—exactly as the right-wing once had—instead of just another one of nature’s fuckups that happened to hit the gay community first and hardest? What I thought was funny about this tweet was the outrageousness of connecting the seriousness of HIV with what is essentially a dumb kids’ show that can be embarrassing just because it’s so lamely, well, gay. I probably should’ve known this would enrage the Gay Police, but I didn’t tweet it at anyone and it seemed funny at the time (and still does). I realized, in the late spring of 2013, if a gay man—or, let’s face it, a straight man—can’t make an HIV joke and somehow connect it with Glee that perhaps we were all getting lost in the French royal court of West Hollywood and, beyond that, heading toward the corporate abyss.
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Because of these tweets and a few similar comments, I’ve been accused of being a self-loathing gay man, and I might be a little self-loathing at times—not an unattractive quality, by the way—but it’s not because I’m gay. I think life is essentially hard, an existential struggle for everyone to varying degrees, and that scalding humor and rallying against life’s built-in absurdities and breaking conventions and misbehaving and encouraging whatever taboo is the most honest path on which to move through the world. Sometimes that means making fun of myself or lashing out in ways that might make dumb-asses or the merely misinformed think that I hate myself for being gay and that a gay man can’t tell a joke equating AIDS with Grindr (something my boyfriend and I had used a number of times) without being scorned as self-loathing is indicative of a new fascism. The real shame isn’t the jokey observations but the lockstep reaction to them. And an even deeper shame in all of this is the fact that most gay guys—who are every bit as hilariously filthy and raunchy and un-PC as their straight counterparts—have to somehow toe GLAAD’s party line in public or else be criticized and banished. A lot of them probably feel they can’t be politically incorrect or provocatively vile in the current culture simply because it doesn’t represent the values of the sainted cause: enforced likability and, ultimately, conformity.
This is a revised version of gay self-victimization, which supposedly is enlightened and ennobled yet doesn’t really connect with any genuine ideas about liberalism and freedom. As a writer I have to believe in free speech no matter what—that’s as simple and true as it gets. On a few occasions I got slammed by young, presumably straight dudes, when I tweeted about glimpsing Alexander Skarsgård naked in a locker room in West Hollywood or that I thought Adam Driver on Girls was the sexiest man on television. “I didn’t follow you to sign up for this gay shit,” someone tweeted back, and another wondered, “Why are you such a fag?” I shrugged it off and didn’t make a federal case out of it, or call the local chapter of GLAAD. I didn’t even bother to block them. Because once you start choosing how people can and cannot express themselves then this opens the door to a very dark room in the corporation from which there’s really no escape. Can’t they in return police your thoughts, and then your feelings and then your impulses? And, finally, can they police, ultimately, your dreams?
l i k i n g
I still remember a conversation I had with a close friend in the spring of 1986, when I was a senior at Bennington College. She and I were driving into town to see a movie, listening to the radio, and once the Bangles’ “Manic Monday” came on I leaned over to turn the volume up, telling my friend, who was driving, that I thought their new record Different Light was really good and this lead single, which had just hit number two on Billboard’s Hot 100, was “impeccably put-together baroque pop”—and if that sounds like something a character in The Rules of Attraction might say, well, that’s the book I was writing then. My friend wrinkled her nose and said the song bothered her because it seemed so dumbly girly. She cited the lyric “ ’cause it takes me so long just to figure out what I’m gonna wear” as an example of the path the glammed-up Bangles were now heading down and noted that a man (Prince!) had written the song. I argued that “Manic Monday” could be construed as feminist because it was about a woman who works tirelessly to support herself and her unemployed boyfriend. But my companion rolled her eyes and obviously wasn’t buying this interpretation; in retrospect, I realized she considered it an act of cultural appropriation thre
e decades before this term was ever used. She’d liked the stripped-down no-nonsense lo-fi first Bangles record, but their super-slick and commercialized new one left her cold and she didn’t like how the lead singer Susanna Hoffs—now deliberately being groomed for hot-babe superstardom—had sexed herself up. (For my straight male friends, the Bangles became a go-to band for the rest of that decade because of Hoffs.) That the whole thing bothered her so much took me completely by surprise. We’d known each other as freshmen, and she was funny, irreverent—how could this humorless take on a Bangles song be possible? I thought Different Light was a huge step forward for a band I’d liked since buying their first EP in 1982, and in fact this was a perfect pop record, the only cassette I listened to on a book tour throughout the UK earlier that year. My memories of that tour are synched with those songs, and the drama of the title track will forever be trailing me through a snowstorm in Manchester.
What shocked me about my friend’s admission—and why I remember what should’ve been an innocuous disagreement about a pop song—was that I finally understood that you could argue about “Manic Monday” or Different Light or the new Bangles on aesthetic grounds. But it never crossed my mind that a smart woman might hold these dislikes for a host of other reasons: because she rejected what the new femmy Bangles were projecting; because to her the song seemed a digression; because it confirmed something that she’d always hated about the music industry. I’ll never forget her mocking Susanna Hoffs’s baby-doll vocals as we drove to the theater in the rainy, deserted town: “I wish it was Sunday / ’cause that’s my fun day / my I don’t have to run day…” I’d loved these vocals on a daily basis for the three months the record had been out and couldn’t believe that my friend had found within this song a troubling commentary on gender. This suddenly silenced my enthusiasm, and I blushed deeply when I grasped her irritation; I didn’t agree with it, but I could see where it came from, and there was no point in defending anything. We simply had two different points of view. It also made me wonder about all the swishy pandering gay stereotypes (were they, really?) I’d had to watch and reject repeatedly throughout my adolescence and young adulthood, stereotypes that my straight friends and classmates seemed to take for granted. What should have been a small, passing moment has instead stayed with me for decades: someone I liked was offended by something I loved. I can’t listen to “Manic Monday” without being reminded of that conversation my friend and I had as we drove through the hills of Vermont, to the dilapidated theater on Main Street. But in fact I was never good at realizing what might offend someone anyway.