Originally appeared in The Advocate, November 15, 1994.
A CHARGE HEARD frequently these days is that some "assimilationist" or "straight-acting" gays are endeavoring to secure equal rights for themselves by selling out "gay-acting" or "nonconformist" gay people -- including drag queens and leathermen -- with whom straight America is uncomfortable.
This allegation always bemuses me. Leaving aside the question of whether such a plot is actually afoot, how, I wonder, can anyone believe that John and Jane Q. Public are more comfortable with "straight-acting" gays than with "gay-acting" ones? On the contrary, nothing's more disconcerting to some folks than a gay man or women who, by failing to conform to stereotype, confounds any attempt to define neat, safe boundaries between the "worlds" of gay and straight. Gay or not, entertainers like Richard Simmons and the late Paul Lynde owe their appeal largely to people's eagerness to have their stereotypes affirmed, their condescension certified. With every word and gesture, such celebrities reinforce the comfortable notion that a homosexual is somebody odd, amusing, flamboyant, ridiculous, and, of course, tragically sad and lonely deep down. A person you can recognize at a hundred paces and whom you would probably never see in your own neighborhood anyway.
What makes many straight people uncomfortable by contrast is any image of gay life and love that seems too ordinary, too familiar. Years ago when I enthusiastically reviewed Prick Up Your Ears, the film about gay playwright Joe Orton, I didn't hear a peep of complaint from my editors at the reactionary American Spectator, for that movie gave a picture of gay life that they were comfortable with. It showed gays as weird, alienated, grubby, marginal, fundamentally unhappy, and destined for tragic ends. The showdown came, rather, over a few positive sentences I wrote about Longtime Companion, which dared to show gay men in steady jobs and fulfilling relationships. To many people that's the revolutionary image.
This way of thinking is by no means confined to right-wingers. Take James Wolcott, who in a 1989 issue of Vanity Fair ridiculed David Leavitt's novel Equal Affections for presenting "a gay version of that nice young couple down the block." Gays, Wolcott made it clear, should be "sexual outlaws." That review was an early salvo in what has since become an assault on "gays next door" by straight liberals who often don't see how offensive they're being. Consider an editorial in the New York Times that appeared in June on the morning of the Stonewall 25 march. After declaring support for gay rights, the editorial criticized "gay moderates and conservatives" for seeking "to assure the country that the vast majority of gay people are 'regular' people just like the folks next door." Like the folks next door? Look again, Times editors: Many of us are the people next door. Similarly, in a recent issue of the Los Angeles Times Magazine, Joe Morgenstern described gay moderates as "a small army of gays who just want to be ordinary Americans." Correction: Most of us are ordinary Americans.
It's not ghetto-bound nonconformist gays, then, but ordinary gays next door that many people find threatening. Why? Because next door to them means next door to their kids. Gays next door means the possibility of a gay man or lesbian as their kids' homeroom teacher or the family doctor or the minister at their church or the friendly neighbor whose lawn their teenage sons mows every weekend. Heaven knows Junior will never know or want to be like an Allen Ginsberg or a Truman Capote or a Quentin Crisp, but -- horrors! -- what about the lawyer next door who happens to be gay? He's somebody they could actually imagine Junior liking and identifying with. Good Lord, deliver us!
A lot of straight people, then, who are entertained by drag queens camping it up in West Hollywood, "open-minded" about an aging beat poet coupling with somebody else's kid in the East Village, and fully supportive of the rights of gays on Castro Street feel deeply threatened by the thought of two gay men in suits coming out of the house next door to them in Scarsdale or San Bernardino or Walnut Creek and picking up the morning newspaper off the porch on their way to work. As Christopher Isherwood said in 1948, "Homosexual relations frequently are happy. Men [and women] live together for years and make homes and share their lives and their work, just as heterosexuals do. This truth is particularly disturbing and shocking even to 'liberal' people, because it cuts across their romantic, tragic notion of the homosexual fate." Exactly. If gays in America are ever to achieve equal rights, we must make it our business to overcome not only outright reactionary bigotry, which seeks to drive us back into the closet, but also this kind of lingering, often liberal discomfort, which -- intentionally or not -- insidiously demands that we know our place. Let's get out the word: Our place is wherever we want it to be.