Common Sense	Common Sense Archive

My friend, who works at a local music conservatory, was complaining about how closeted the music students are. "It's quite usual that the beautiful young tenor will be dating the pretty young soprano his first year. By the second year, he's moved in with the baritone and they've become boyfriends. But we still can't get a gay group started on campus and it looks like we never will."

I sympathized. What my friend was not aware of was Mitzel's Rule #11 in Gay Life: The Finer The Art, The Deeper The Closet.

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In the food chain of the Art World, the poets can be the queerest-- Whitman, Ginsberg, O'Hara, John Wieners. That's probably because poetry has such a low status in our so-called Kulture. "Normal" folks think poets are all weird anyway (few poets make any money, the coin of our realm), and, in fact, the weirdest poet of them all was T. S. Eliot, the lad from St. Louis.

The painters are one step up. Think of Larry Rivers, Warhol, Charles Demuth. The problem with the painters is that they can, willy-nilly, turn out to be cash cows, and that's when-- you know....

The literary world can tolerate some gay life, but not too much. When you get to that rung of the ladder, the conservative winds are already blowing. Independent filmmaking seems to be the gay-friendliest terrain in Art World today. Commercial filmmaking has its rules pretty well chipped in the stone. And those tablets can be read by all, even the really stupid.

The world of the museum curators is, I suspect, an icy one. The realm of the composers and musicians is the world of the deepest closets. It has to do with the smallness of that world. There are exceptions to every general rule, but these opinions reflect my experience.

I just finished reading a piece in the New Yorker about how "Jewish" do American Jews want to be. Currently, there has been considerable discussion. The writer recounted her life growing up Orthodox, a rather strict religious upbringing, regular observances and so on. And, of course, her slow and successful rebellion against all that and her turn to a larger cultural assimilation. I was reminded that in most communities, ethnic and religious, the elders have to train and discipline their members, and not just the young, but the young particularly, into conformity with the group's norms. This involves a lot of Thou Shalt Nots, prohibitions on behaviors, diet, language, and the like. This probably accounts for why one meets so many ex-Catholics. But when you get to the world of gay men, there is the one looming question that no one has successfully answered as of yet and that is this: How is it that so many gay men, emerging out of so many differing cultural, religious, and family backgrounds reach the shores of Gay Land in most cases fully formed and, more or less, all on the same frequency? Gay men get and make camp-- something straight folks simply cannot do in any equal measure-- they make and get the same jokes, they talk in the same kinds of code and can decipher shades of meaning in a way that no curriculum in their past meant to train them. Yet it happened.

How has this come to happen? It's happening right now as you read this. Young gay men right now are listening to Barbra Streisand, old Broadway musical cast albums, Diana Ross hits, and others from the pantheon-- and discovering that gay boy thrill in pornography, a perk for the younger generation. Only the gay men are really good at getting all the layering and doubleness in social communications and gesturing. The actress Celeste Holm, the only surviving member of the cast of the movie All About Eve, was in town not long ago. She was attending a gala screening of that camp classic at a big-screen event. The audience was about half gay men, as you would expect. Holm was later interviewed by a local press reporter. Celeste noted that gay men always get so much more out of the film than do the heterosexuals, and, here's the kicker, probably even more than the filmmakers even intended! Why is that? Is all popular culture just a series of jokes for gay guys to laugh at? Could be. Wouldn't that make this the finest of the arts? And, of course, it's the quean contingent in the audience that makes the fun in the now-touring Sing-A-Long Sound Of Music ("Hi! Julie!").

Gay men are born into a diaspora. We grow up in what Christopher Isherwood named The Heterosexual Dictatorship. Then, somehow, like the monarch butterflies-- and I just read in the rags today that the monarchs are losing their homeland in Mexico to "development"-- we migrate to those areas wherein we can cluster and create a cultural density and, to use a concept offered in physics by Einstein, bend space and time. Gay men's density quickly changes everything. I read somewhere that some place in South America is all bent out of shape because it turns out that their flag closely resembles the rainbow flag, now a symbol of gay pride. They are all a'tizzy lest the world think their country queer. And then, of course, you have the Boy Scouts of America; they won their case in the Supreme Court and now face de-funding, banishment, and censure. Well, you get what you pay for. When will they ever learn? And to finish with a nod to the lower arts, what of the ex-gays, so-called? I assume they're simply ex-Divas for whom-- well, it's too sad to even contemplate.

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