Mind Your T's and Q's

Some of my best friends are straight. Insert sarcasm. Amazingly, when you function as a productive member of society and you happen to be gay, you basically have to learn how to navigate and manipulate the heterosexual society in order to promote the Gay Agenda.

Kidding. Sort of.

It's funny, so many times when Essie and I meet people (and if there is alcohol) someone invariably blurts out, "you guys are totally not event gay" as if it were a compliment to "pass" as a straight person. "I mean, you guys are so normal." Um, thanks? I'm lucky (?) to be the type of gay who holds a corporate job in a white, straight, male dominated industry. I prefer preppy fashion. I don't act like Carson Kressley. I'd rather listen to Radiohead than Britney Spears. This just happens to be me. It's also not me all the time. Sometimes I really like to queen out, which might make those acquaintances slap their words between two slices of San Francisco sourdough and bite down harder than a nipple clamp in the Castro.

I'm afraid that people think I'm assimilating when, in fact, I'm trying to colonize. I know someone who always says that "you can't be a little prejudiced" when we're talking pro-gay issues. I wonder if she would still be so open if I said that I wanted to get a sex change. People like gay as long as it kinda sorta looks like them.

Same goes for the new gay bourgeois. There is a wave of gay men who want marriage the way heteros have it. They only accept people who look like them. They are afraid of transsexuals and deplore polyamorous relationships. They want to be as heteronormative as possible.

Frankly, I love the queers. As gay becomes more and more mainstream, I feel like it's my responsibility to help and support the queers on the fringes of society who we still ignore, taunt, and terrorize.

I'm afraid that the same men who want to make people comfortable with their brand of gay, don't know their history. Act Up, The AIDS quilt, die-ins on the capitol in the 80's are all distant memories of a generation who barely exists because their peers perished. Sean Penn as Harvey Milk painted a gay-lite version of a struggle pre-80's before the greatest disease of our generation decimated a population. While I'm happy that I don't have to deal with AIDS on a personal level or with my immediate friends, I envy the camaraderie that the LGBTQ community had amidst a health crisis some 20 years ago.

I believe that everyone must know their history in order to understand their identity. Everyone goes through an identity development process, predominantly in adolescence. The young baby gays can't let the sterilized TV versions of gay form who they become in adulthood.

I don't pray, but if I did, I would give thanks to the men who took their last breath at St. Vincent's and the lesbians who sat at their bedsides. I would praise their bravery and determination to live lives according to queer ideals. I would thank the drag queen who threw the first brick at the Stonewall riot. I would give a spiritual high five to Oscar Wilde and Virginia Wolfe.

I attribute who I have become as a homo to people who fought for their queer identities and demanded to be treated decently, not to Will & Grace, Queer Eye, Sex in the City, et al.

I want everyone on my lawn, no matter how queer. It's up to those of us who appear more hetero-friendly to be advocates for the T's and Q's of the LGBTQ community. You have to know you enemy and then you have to operate on their level and then you take over their empire and bring all your queers with you. We have to stop the ghettoizaion that happens in our community and broaden our understanding of what it means to be queer. Next time someone tells Essie and I that we're "not that gay" I'm going to ask, "What do you mean? What kind of gay people make you uncomfortable?" while subsequently applying pink lip gloss and stripping down to a sequined jock strap.