In an increasingly uncertain world, there are certain things I know: that anyone professing virginity on Elimidate is not going home alone; that if Brad Pitt asked me for a yoga position, I’d do the downward-facing dog; and that, based on the bulk of e-mails I received in 2003, if you yell “pansy!” at a Northwest nancy, he’ll run screaming back into the closet as surely as Tom Cruise loves a Nehru collar on a leather jacket.
Last year, I mused that National Coming Out Month was meaningless because, frankly, there is still no one in the public eye who wants to come out, and until we tell everybody what’s (and who’s) going down, the nation at large will still view homosexuality as something rare and shameful. I even had the audacity to suggest that closeted people of prestige might want to think about their place in the grand scheme of things, and that the little Judy Garland lovers getting trounced in schoolyards everywhere might get a shot at a happy life if all the big butch movie stars currently taking it up the yahoo would speak up and silence the bullies who idolize them. Oy, did the local girls get their skirts in a flurry over that one; you’d have thunk I suggested they stay out of the Gap.
“Unless, I’m hitting you from behind like a freight train, whose business is it what my sexuality is?” wrote David, taking a break from his other clearly dominant duties. “I had no role models when I was a confused teenager from the suburbsI had to figure it all out myself. Sure, I made some mistakes, like thinking gay men only met in public bathrooms, but I found the bars . . . eventually.” So, David, would you say that was an experience you’d recommend? Geez, I suppose you had to walk five miles uphill through the snow just to get to school every day, too.
Brandon, from Kirkland, was also a little worried.
“I think to myself, ‘Why should I go around telling people who I am sleeping with?'” he moaned, echoing dominant David and most of the other missives. “It is no one’s business. I don’t need a month or another person telling me when I should come out to the world.”
All right, ladies, let’s clear the air here: Yes, everybody gets the time to decide who they are. If you’re in any kind of perilous financial dependency or grave social danger, then, sure, come out only when the getting’s good; I don’t advocate signing your own death warrant, and contrary to popular belief, I was not waving a rainbow flag while still in the cradle. And another thingwhile it’s always fun coming up with genital euphemisms and catchy phrases for homo sex, if you really believe that being gay only extends the length of your beanpole, you’re more confused than invitees to Liza’s wedding. My hope here is for a world where it really doesn’t matter who you sleep with. That world is not going to happen through magic, and, I hate to tell you, it isn’t going to happen through Will & Grace, either. Let’s head into 2004 recognizing that silence is not always a virtue.
