Homosexuality homogenized: What's lost when gay aesthetic goes mainstream?
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Now of course "Hairspray" is a Broadway smash, billed as the Feel-Good Musical of the Century, and Harvey Fierstein reprising Divine's Edna Turnblad is considered much more charming than avant-garde — the man served as the unofficial grand marshal at last year's Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade. In a big red dress. As Mrs. Claus.
This was probably not the morning in America Ronald Reagan had in mind. Ten years ago, the sight of steely-eyed Terence Stamp wearing a big, pink wig-hat and glitter eye shadow, mouthing the words to "Dancing Queen" in "The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert" left middle-of-the-road moviegoers gasping for air.
Since then, gender outrageousness has become more commonplace, sifted and stirred into the mainstream by everyone from Jerry Springer to Oprah to "The Lion King's" Timon ("Whaddya want me to do, dress up in drag and dance the hula?"). Between Nathan Lane, who voiced Timon as well as Snowbell in "Stuart Little 1" and "Stuart Little 2," and Eddie Murphy in "Shrek" ("I'm a donkey on the edge!") many American children will be conversant in camp by the time they're 6.
The gay aesthetic has long shaped the arts, especially the performing arts. But some within the gay community feel that the mainstreaming of certain aspects of gay culture, including drag and high camp, has come at the cost of its political edge. Outlaws of all sorts define the middle by creating the boundaries; through outrageousness, they tinker with the definitions of acceptable. What will the world have come to if Fierstein, whose 1982 Tony-winning "Torch Song Trilogy" blew the closet to pieces and dumped New York's bathhouse scene into the laps of theatergoing Middle America, becomes just another portly man in a dress?
It isn't just drag and camp that have gone mainstream. Madison Avenue has recently recognized the gay and lesbian market, tailoring same-sex ads first for gay publications, then for freeway billboards. For 15 minutes, thousands of people were actually getting married in San Francisco and now the "gay agenda" is a keystone of the presidential campaign and daily comic strips that are not Doonesbury. "Metrosexual" has become shorthand for straight guys who shop, and decorate, and groom themselves like gay guys; and the word "queer" has been transformed from a pejorative to a semi-snooty school of thought — in even casual conversation, "queer" is likely to be followed by terms such as "cinema" or "aesthetic" or "studies."
Such are the manifestations of the much-scrutinized Growing Acceptance of Gays in America. This attitude shift has been obvious in the zeitgeist for several years, keeping the cast of "Will & Grace" in a perpetual state of Emmy nomination, making "The L Word" the new "Knots Landing," "Queer Eye" the new "Queen for a Day" and recently allowing the butch and smoldering Frank Langella to perfect the art of swish in the just-opened play "Match" without causing little old ladies from Tenafly, N.J., who just loved him in "Dracula," to faint at the mere prospect.
Gay culture has always been tricky to define, now more than ever. Paul Rudnick was recently taken to task in the New York Observer for littering the New York stage with trashy gay plays in the name of social equality. And Fierstein, who caught flak from gays and straights for "Torch Song's" premise that gay men might want something like a nuclear family of their own, agrees that much of gay culture seems too concerned with the mainstream and not enough about the quality of the art.
Although he was thrilled at the response his Thanksgiving Day appearance evoked — "millions of people just screaming my name, and with the Macy's parade, millions isn't even an exaggeration" — Fierstein was very aware that this was the only way he, an openly gay man and longtime gay-rights advocate, was going to get on a float. "Having Edna Turnblad play Mrs. Claus made it safer," he said in a phone interview from New York, "like we were all in on the joke. But the only real person there was me, a gay man."
He sees much of the popularization of gay sensibility as "winks to straight people. We used to raise up the nation, now we're trying to prove that we too can wear T-shirts that say 'I'm With Stupid.' "
But progress often has a price. "In our efforts to homogenize," Fierstein says, "we've dumbed down gay culture."
"The two pioneering forces of modern sensibility are Jewish moral seriousness and homosexual aestheticism and irony," wrote Susan Sontag in her seminal 1964 essay "Notes on Camp."
Or, as Oscar Wilde put it: "It's absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious."
For so long, the queer voice has been an outsider's voice, outraged and outrageous, keeping tabs on what was really going on at the party, all the undercurrents and hypocrisies, the mysterious exits and rustlings off stage. Tony Kushner did not just deconstruct the impact of AIDS in "Angels in America," he took on marriage, motherhood, politics, racism, true love, religion and the nature of heaven — all through the prism of a disparate assortment of people. In the work of Gore Vidal, Truman Capote, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs and Tennessee Williams, the repression of sexuality is symbolic of the many lies society tells its members and its members tell themselves. The French film "La Cage aux Folles" was not so much about drag diva-dom as it was about the absurdity, and impossibility, of trying to regulate everyone into some sort of gender sameness and about the strange nature of love. (The American remake is a good example of what happens when the gay sensibility is dumbed down.)
Most important, the queer aesthetic provided a necessary alternative to the dominant culture, an insistent reminder that, as Shakespeare was so fond of pointing out through his gender-bending characters, all is not what it seems. "Camp was necessary because it provided a way to take control over the negative images of queer folk in the mainstream culture," says Thomas King, director of graduate studies at Brandeis University, who has written extensively on gender politics and the history of camp. "In this alternative world, norms of gender, domesticity, privacy and sexuality could all be replayed to new effects. Now, we're all fighting for privacy, domesticity and marriage at the price of a collective identity."
What is lost, he says, is the chance to use sexuality as a way to rethink social norms in general, to enrich society beyond the traditional definition of family. "In Provincetown these days you see men taking their babies to Herring Cove Beach," King says.
"Men are being asked to police themselves, to keep themselves family-presentable. And there has been very little protest, which is too bad."
"There can be a lot of homophobia around the investment this culture makes in children as the future," he says.
"That is one way gays were marginalized — without children, they literally had no future. But that is also one of the reasons they were often so creative, to fight against that, to leave a legacy through the culture. It would be terrible if we lost those alternatives."
Ground-breaking author John Rechy fears gay culture is being neutered to make it more palatable for public consumption. He hates "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy" — "the men are like gay nannies, catering to straight people, trying to make them prettier" — and "Will & Grace" — "Will never has sex. What kind of a gay man is that?"
Assimilation often courts obliteration, and Rechy fears society is headed for a "dull, gray sameness."
"We are not just like you," he says, "any more than women are the same as men. If we try to get rid of the differences, we lose the richness of our identity. Liberation is not about sameness."
Still, it may be dangerous to too closely compare sexual assimilation with race or cultural assimilation.
"The edge between inside and outside has always been weird," says David Ehrenstein, author of "Open Secret: Gay Hollywood 1928-2000." "Gay culture has always existed within straight culture, unlike the blacks or the Jews or the Irish who were literally 'over there.' We've always been there, just no one's paid attention."
Now, he says, straight people have discovered that they need to know who is gay and what that means just to keep the conversation going. "One has to do a lot of reading," he says, laughing, "get the Judy Garland at Carnegie Hall CD and the movie list. It's a project."
But in the new world order, will Judy, symbol of the high-wire act between diva-dom and self-destruction, still be necessary? Of course, Ehrenstein says; there will always be drama. "If there isn't opera involved," he says, "I for one am not interested."