Common Sense	Common Sense Archive

Recently, a friend and I were chatting away on the phone. For some reason, we got onto the Mitford sisters. "Which one of them was the Nazi?" he asked. "That was Unity Valkyrie," I said, adding "The one who put a bullet in her head." "No, not her," he said, "the other one," indicating a family full of fascists. "The other one was Diana, who had been married to the Guinness beer heir but dumped him to marry the British fascist, Oswald Mosley." This led us to a round of banter about the marriages of the Mitford sisters-- we had trouble thinking of Jessica first husband (Esmond Romilly?)-- and at some point, I had to stop the conversation and ask: "Why do we know all this shit?" (Just one Jessica story. One day, some quean gushed up to Jessica and said: "Miss Mitford, your life and the lives of your sisters are so interesting they'd make a fabulous opera!" "Oh, really?" sniffed Jessica, not impressed. "And what would they call it-- La Triviata?")

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Why indeed?

Are the recesses of the gay brain cluttered with clumps of cultural detritus? Do some of us know perhaps a little too much about the films of Veronica Lake? The greatest arias sung by Grace Bumbry? The minutiae of the British Royal Family and their sordid lives? The trajectory of the social career of the late Brenda Frazier? The catalogue of Tallulah Bankhead jokes-- both real and the apocrypha?

The formation of the gay brain is a wondrous thing indeed, given the mountain of mainstream stats that the media tries to input, starting at an early age. And it is important to note at the outset that not every homosexual male has a gay brain, just as all blondes do not have blue eyes. The straight brain quickly fills up with sports stats, football plays, advertising jingles, etc.

I once made the comment, in these very pages, that I had never met a person-- in fact I doubted the existence of such-- who was both an opera queen and a sports fan. I promptly heard from poet/publisher/cultural phenomenon Jonathan Williams who acknowledged that he was both and always had been. Jonathan is a terrific man and, at least in this regard, I think a unique person. Since Jonathan, I haven't met another.

Need we subscribe to fashionable theories in evolutionary biology to explain the existence of the gay brain? Must every adaptation be associated with some utility? What utility-- other than entertainment value-- can there be in knowing all the lyrics to Stephen Sondheim's musicals? I used to think I had met all the types of queans extant. Guess what? I still meet new ones, not as frequently as when younger, but the assembly line is still churning them out. There was a soap-opera queen-- a new genus to me, completely obsessed by the plot developments and personalities on numerous TV soaps. Another ancient acquaintance has morphed into a real old-fashioned High Church Camp Quean, a type I thought wasn't processed anymore and had been retired to the quean dinosaur museum. I was wrong, but it seems this kind of oddity might only exist in the rarefied air of certain hoity-toity Boston circles. Boston fosters its own pathologies and city-specific characterological deformations-- each city generates its own, don't you think? Indeed, his gay brain has been working overtime, as it would have to in order to hold together his fabulous, if eccentric-- some might regard as obnoxious-- creation.

Characteristic of the gay brain is not only its capacity to fill up with cultural lint, oddball info, and loose ends of extended narratives, but its amazing ability to invent-- overcome existing fact-- and slough off injury, a significant adaptation given the history of rejection, insult, and denial so many gay men endure for so much of their lives. In fact, a case might be made that the gay brain's interest and absorption of cultural cobwebs is its own comment on the existing world and its priorities-- not just a camp chromosome, but a defiant rejection of what I simply regard as "The Football Culture." (My neighbor who lives next to my workplace asked me if I was going to watch The SuperBowl. I was appalled at the thought. "Howard," I said, "I'm a sissy. Sissies don't like football!" Howard seemed surprised; I guess no one had told him.)

The camp element is a nice add on-- and again, not every homosexual can camp, much less get the camp, but the phenomenon does seem to be quean-specific. How else explain the prose style-- and point of view-- of Parker Tyler? James McCourt (actually that's "the divine James McCourt"), in his forthcoming (August, 2003) meditation on gay life from WWII until Stonewall-- Queer Street-- will explore the parameters of the unique gay culture that developed in New York City at that time, full of contradictions, in an era of enormous official hostility, the products of which were distinct and substantial. Would West Side Story be the same if it had been assembled by a team of all straight Protestant men? Wasn't Cardinal Spellman the Mae West of the Catholic Church-- the Tallulah joke about Spellman: "Darling, your drag is divine but your purse is on fire!"

You can't do that anymore. The world has changed, in some ways accommodating. But the gay brain still crunches on, all in the biological imperative of making things just a bit more interesting, and, for some, intriguing.

Author Profile:  Mitzel
	Mitzel was a founding member of the Fag Rag collective, and has been a Guide columnist since 1986. He manages Calamus Books near Boston's South Station.
	Email:	mitzel@calamusbooks.com
	Website:	calamusbooks.com