Is gender-bending the new parlor game for Gen-Y singles? True, androgyny is as old as Oscar Wilde and as retro-chic as glam rock. But I’m saying, does all this casual speculation mean we’re in an age of blurred lines again, where sexuality is totally up for grabs?
You’d think so. Surveys say this generation is much more tolerant about having gay chums, or acknowledging past gay experiences. Watching American television, shows like Queer Eye for the Straight Guy and Will & Grace are the most popular examples of the absorption of gay culture into the mainstream. It used to be the "outing" game: Which actor/actress is secretly gay? The new game implies a new acceptance: Being gay is not only okay, it’s fun to pretend! Kind of like the way white American youths would adopt stereotyped gangsta lifestyles of their favorite black rappers back in the ’90s.
Nowadays, the lingo, the sensibility, the often subversive wit of gay culture are all part of our weekly entertainment – no longer something closely guarded, shunned or looked at askance as in the old days.
How do gays feel about all this? Well, one would think they’d be happy to have so many new media outlets. But some, like fashion designer Isaac Mizrahi, think enough is enough. The flamboyant designer joked on Conan O’Brien a while back that the gay wave is so overdone, he’s thinking of becoming a heterosexual.
This is all very weird. Gays are probably at the peak of their exposure, gaining cultural acceptance through media-friendly role models on television, in writing and film. But are they happy about it? Hard to say, though things can’t be as bad as the bad old days of closeted gays, right?
But wait a minute. Maybe there’s something to be said for the camouflage of the closet. I’m currently reading Beautiful Shadow, Andrew Wilson’s biography of crime writer Patricia Highsmith. She’s the one responsible for The Talented Mr. Ripley, Strangers on a Train and other absorbingly weird thrillers of the ’50s. And she was a lesbian.
As a writer, Highsmith could climb inside the mind of a demented character like no one else. Alfred Hitchcock picked up on her peculiar talent and made several movies in which the audience identifies closely with the killer. Psycho, Shadow of a Doubt, Frenzy – the whole genre of the charming serial killer that later found full bloom in Hannibal Lecter owes everything to Highsmith.
Yet, the writer was living at a time when sexual desires were kept strongly in check. Wilson talks about one incident when Highsmith was working at Bloomingdale’s in NYC as a toy store clerk. A beautiful married woman came in and purchased some toys for her children. Highsmith was struck by her beauty and, scarcely aware of why she was doing it, copied down the woman’s address from the sales receipt. That night she took a commuter train to the woman’s town and a bus to her neighborhood. She stood outside and watched the stranger’s house from afar. She repeated this surveillance a number of times, playing the stalker long before the term even existed. Then, she would go home and feverishly write about the experience.
The elusive woman became a strong influence on Highsmith’s writing, and perhaps on her developing sexuality. The perspective of the outsider, someone at odds with social norms but determined to watch, to follow and to pursue her fixations: This was Highsmith’s archetypal character. But though she channeled her obsessions into writing, she remained, like most gay women of her day, essentially in the closet.
What if she’d been out of the closet, though? Would her writing still have the same obsessive power?
Or, take Tennessee Williams. If he were as openly gay as, say, Alan Cumming, would the great Southern playwright have been able to probe, explore and dissect the dysfunctional American family as well as he did in A Streetcar Named Desire or The Glass Menagerie? Blanche Dubois may be the clearest depiction in American literature of an oversensitive creature destroyed by a callous society. But would Williams have understood this oppressed character so well if he weren’t a closet queen? And would secretly gay writer John Cheever’s unsettling depictions of suburban paradise be so effective if he weren’t so used to keeping secrets?
For that matter, would Rock Hudson have been any better an actor if he had embraced his homosexuality and used it in his craft?
Hard to say. Artists are peculiar creatures. They need turmoil, conflict and angst to get at the heart of things. They need, in some sense, to feel like outsiders. Maybe sitting on the fence, sexually speaking, was a good thing for many great writers and artists of the 20th century (don’t ask me to name names).
No, I’m not saying that coming out hasn’t been a great thing for gays. Anyway, it’s the going thing – no turning back the clock now. I respect anybody’s decision to come out, just as I respect anyone’s desire to remain in the closet. And certainly the sexuality of each of these artists was not the only thing driving their aesthetic – the fact that Highsmith was a Texan and an athiest no doubt shaped her writing just as much.
But now that everything’s out in the open, perhaps art suffers a bit from the lack of tension and conflict. And now that society is turning what is essentially a personal, primary thing – one’s sexuality – into the new parlor game, maybe gay culture risks becoming what it has so long resisted throughout its history: Commonplace.