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"Summer Of" Series' 1st installment: The Summer of gay. Glambert, Bruno & The Boys in the Band
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There is a gay revolution this Summer, and not just because it's gay history month. In the pop culture conversation, the growing list of gay-inspired topics is more varied than before, with Bruno on one end, Carrie Prejean on the other, and folks like Glambert, Valentino, Andrew Sullivan and Chastity "Chaz" Bono in between. The case of Chaz is a transgender issue-its own category-but he has cited the sex change as a way to circumvent the gay marriage issue.
While it's impossible to ignore the unfinished cultural conversation on gay marriage, it's harder to ignore Glambert's weirdly trimmed chest hair on the cover of Rolling Stone. (Every hair the same length? I don't think so.) The American Idol runner up. On the cover of Rolling Stone. Out of the closet. Being out is approaching the realm of nonversation, though I was surprised that everyone focused on the "I'm gay" part of the article and not the admissions of drug use.
And then there is the straight community giving "gay" right back. On I'm A Celebrity, Get Me Out Of Here, Sanjaya came out as not just a gay friendly straight man, but as gay identified, preferring the role of the gay best friend to ordering a pan pizza for a night of Spike TV with "Ronnie" and "Roy". And while Sanjaya's sexuality is the stuff of debate, this f&g hag is getting a straight vibe.
Though I could be wrong. I did think Ted and I were on a "date" in college. I should have known when he pulled up in his VW bug wearing my same outfit: a school-boy blazer and shorts.
Gay does not mean drag, but it used to be that drag usually meant gay. Not this Summer. Cheers and jeers to the straight guy who employed drag to impersonate his dead Mom for her gov'mt checks. And he met the criteria for good drag: authenticity. His character did not call for glam, and he didn't give it, opting instead for the Luby's, 5PM dinner crowd look. Though for situations that do require glam, there is a straight group paying homage: women.
In the face of bohemian chic, there are women instead borrowing from drag's extra-hyper femininity. Seasoned lady drag queens like Pam Anderson, Carmen Elektra and Cher have paved the way for today's heavily lip-linered set, Holly Madison, Brooke Hogan and Lady Gaga. If you need further proof, Perez Hilton, posing in a photo with Lady Gaga, writes "Who's the husband and who's the wife?". Posh was the A#1 example of female drag, but now she's toning down the outfits and tanning a few shades lighter, yielding more girl than queen.
It will be interesting to see what other circles on the gay identity scantron sheet get filled in, and when. Like in the straight spectrum, at some point the anwer will be "all of the above". And while today we have real-life examples of these widely varied gay identities, there was a fictional story that laid them all out a long time ago, a now prophetic play turned movie called, The Boys in the Band.
When The Boys in the Band opened off-Broadway in 1968, who knew it would become the stuff of theater legend? Before becoming a film, it played for 1001 nights to a perpetually packed house including attendances by Groucho Marx, Jackie Kennedy and Marlene Dietrich.
The Boys in the Band was a psychological study that did employ familiar gay camp-presumably to strike a chord with the audience-but unfolded into an unflinching and universal portrait of friendship. Over one evening, on one set-a fabulous, late 60's, Upper East side apartment-eight vastly different men-ranging from straight acting/straight appearing to irrevocably nelly-engage in loving and biting interplay that descends into painfully relatable revelations about past loves.
Back then, only those who chose to attend were able to experience these nine fundamentally different gay personalities, personalities previously unseen together, in a piece of theater. But they were fictional characters in a private setting. It was a long time before the arrival of today's very real personalities on the public stage, and the transition was rough.
The play and film did undergo a critical backlash, citing the story's more stereotypical elements, and of the nine actors in the play and film, the six who were gay all died of AIDS-related complications. The Boys in the Band still receives criticism, but since a brief theater revival in '96, some now embrace it as a part of the larger, gay cultural conversation-a conversation that not only gets its own month, but a Summer. I bet it's not over in the Fall.
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