THE ETERNAL HEAD SCRATCHER

-->There’s so much about the world we live in that I don’t get.

·      The Kardashians (At least my old version of Word underlines the word with a red squiggly line.)

·      Matt Lauer

·      Golf (Unless it includes little windmills.)

·      Tom Cruise (Not once. Not even when he danced around to a Seger song I sorta liked.)

·      The American president

·      Playoff beards (If you grow it, groom it.)

·      The Second Amendment (Right to bear arms? Really? Who talks like that? Isn’t that evidence enough that it doesn’t fit our times? If we keep the phrase, it should be jiggered to the “right to bare arms” because that is something I think is worthy of debate. I wore a tank to the gym last week and I’m pretty sure it was very, very wrong.)

·      Any incarnation of “Law and Order”

·      Treating travel like a selfie scavenger hunt (See Eiffel Tower. Get your selfie. Dash to the Champs-Élysées. Get your selfie. Repeat, post, repeat.)

·      All things Pokemon

·      The “Full House” revival (Yeah, I watched it way back when, but it’s no “Brady Bunch”.)

·      Britney (Sorry. She doesn’t sing!)

·      Auto-tune (See above.)

·      Zombies and shows with zombies (Makeup could be put to better use.)

·      New Year’s Eve (Getting drunk to watch a clock tick and mumble-sing the lyrics to a song less than 1% of the population knows? I’d campaign to make Groundhog Day a bigger deal.)

·      All these cooking shows where contestants compete (More clock watching and we never get to taste any of it.)

·      The endless making of superhero movies (I like my Ryan Reynolds out of costume.)

·      The urgency people feel in acquiring the latest iPhone (and why that “i” is lower case)

·      Dr. Who and why they keep changing the lead actor (Sorry.)

           

I could go on.

If I were living in an age of the guillotine, a mob of angry villagers would track me down, chant, “Off with his head!” and that would be that. (I am very grateful guillotines are a thing of the past. Let’s not make them retro, okay?) Of course, there’s still that pesky Second Amendment…

For the longest time, I didn’t get Twitter either. But a colleague of mine—rather, a retired colleague (albeit from Tech Services)—told me it was all the rage and I absolutely had to get on it. So I did. My Twitter page informs me that I’ve been tweeting since July 2009. Eight years of hooey. I’ve got time for it, I suppose. It’s not like I’m the American president.

I’m not as clueless about Twitter as I used to be. It served its purpose on lonely Saturday nights when I lived in a rural nowhere-land and someone would “Like” my tweet linking to an Olivia Newton-John song. (No auto-tuning.) I was glued to Twitter as news came out about the horrid happenings at Pulse nightclub in Orlando. And I’ve been heartened to see regular pics of seemingly happy gay couples of all ages, shapes and sizes.

Over the course of my Twitter existence, I’ve noticed changes in how gay men identify themselves. Early on, there were a lot of eggs and vague monikers like “PeoriaGayGuy” and “TheGayGardener”. Heck, that’s how I opened my account: “RuralGay”. I didn’t go with the conventional egg. (It made me look fat in the middle.) I don’t even remember, but I must have gone with a rural picture or some badly cropped headshot.

I haven’t seen an egg on Twitter in ages. A good thing.

For a while though, I was concerned that some of the younger tweeps seemed to reject gay. A lot of “bromos” opened accounts. Never really got it. I’m gay, but not like that? Through my old eyes, the term seemed to separate rather than unite. The bromo fad appears to have waned.

All this brings me to the latest thing I don’t get on Twitter. Rather than hiding behind an egg or adopting a new term, I’ve noticed a lot of Twitter bio blurbs where the men identify themselves as “gay AF”. In the ‘90s, that would be daring. Screw you, Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, I’m a proud gay member of the Air Force.

Okay, even I knew that couldn’t be it. But I knew we’re in that sort of “screw you” world these days. (We have world leaders exchanging barbs about being “old” and “fat”, after all.) So this new trend is to self-identify as “gay as fuck”, aka gay AF.

Hmm. Suddenly Dana Carvey’s Church Lady is in my head: “Well, isn’t that special?!” It is great that these guys aren’t hiding in a closet or behind vague names and blurry pics. Kudos. How far we have come, indeed. I guess I just don’t know why we need to make the “AF” a thing. Be loud. Be proud! More than that, be involved. Be open to accepting the wide range of people for whom the rainbow flag flies.

But gay AF? I shrug at best. I don’t get it. Add it to my list.

SWISH MANAGEMENT

-->

We’re our own worst enemies. That can be true when referring to ourselves or to the communities in which we belong.

Let’s set aside the self-hate and consider gay community’s enduring target within: the effeminate gay man. An October 2017 “Masculinity Survey” of 5,000 gay men by the British magazine, Attitude, revealed that 71% are turned off by effeminate mannerisms in other gay men. As well, 41% felt that effeminate gay men give the “community” a bad image or a bad reputation.

Sigh.

Longer sigh.

When does it end? I remember long, long ago—that is, before online dating and hooking up—when men who wanted to broaden their search beyond the bar scene took out personal ads in freebie news-ish publications. You could scan the page until you got to MEN SEEKING MEN. That’s when lonely hearts (or two-timers) stopped talking about pina coladas and getting caught in the rain and became more direct. “No femmes”. (These same great catches often said “No” to fats and Asians.) The defense was always, “Nothing personal.” (How is that not personal?!) “I’m just being honest.” God knows what other endearingly open comments might come out over dinner or that foreplay-inducing bottle of Bud.

We’ve evolved only slightly since then. Rather than being directly offensive, the single suitor (or two-timer/member of open relationship) states online that he’s a “masculine”, fit, white guy, seeking the same. It remains clear who should not apply for an amazing opportunity.

We spent decades in hiding, sticking to closets and darkened bars. In more public places, we walked alongside boyfriends with ample space between us, often saving our open hugs for the fun girl who was always happy (and available) to join us.

We spent the more recent decades demanding to be heard, first for advances in the fight over AIDS and then, when that fight miraculously ebbed, pushing for anti-discrimination legislation and marriage equality. The AIDS crisis weakened us while making us braver and bolder at the same time. Desperation, heightened each time another lover, friend or acquaintance died, made our closets seem silly. Silence and fears about being shamed, ostracized, fired and disowned gave way over time.

Oh, what progress we have made! So now that we’ve achieved such gains in public acceptance, 41% of us wish the more effeminate among us would toe the line. There are some behaviors that still need to be controlled, honed in…closeted. Your high-pitched voices and limp wrists are ruining our reputations! (And to think I posted three selfies of my abs after my gym workout today. Sure I got a lot of “Likes” but that hip swish of yours is killing me.) So bad for the reputation. And, to that 71% among us, such a turn off.

We pushed hard for acceptance. It came faster than many of us older gays (i.e., over 35) could have imagined. But apparently the acceptance is not for all of us, at least when we look within our community. It’s maddening but it’s not surprising. Many gays continue to struggle with low self-esteem, even self-hate. How fragile is acceptance? Are straight people only sounding evolved to be politically correct? What about all those red states? What about when I wander from the city? Self-hate and fear often manifest outwardly and, by golly, the femmes are just embarrassing. I’m not like them. Really, I swear.

Back in my ancient coming out days of the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, I monitored my voice and mannerisms. There was that pesky pinky that liked to stick out as I gently sipped a lite beer. (More limes, please.) My wrists, if not limp, were as thin as the daintiest of women no matter how many sets of dumbbells I curled. My primary object was to “pass”. It’s ironic that so much of coming to terms with being gay was preoccupied with acting straight. Please, let us have made real progress since then. Please let us be who we are. We’ve extended our community from “gay and lesbian” to a growing alphabet of terms and identities. So why haven’t we grown in our understanding and acceptance of the “G” itself?

If anything, there should be greater respect and gratitude to the more effeminate among us. “Passing” was never an option for them. While the rest of us hid, they bore the brunt of slurs and hate crimes when prejudice went largely unchecked. They heard the snickers behind their backs and felt the shunning in their earliest years. How shameful that they might continue to be outcasts in our own community.

We have co-opted positive terms like gay and pride and we’ve flown rainbow flags to represent our diversity. Let us check our own prejudices and endeavor to truly welcome and accept all the colors and incarnations our flag is meant to represent.

HAS THE LINE MOVED?

Never thought Kevin Spacey coming out would have people talking. But, from what I’m seeing online, there is some division on sideline sentencing and whether there is any guilt at all.

I don’t think anyone can convince me that he didn’t cross the line in making the moves on a fourteen-year-old actor. Some people offer the vague defense that many minors go to bars and lie about their age. Not the case here. Spacey knew Anthony Rapp and he knew the guy was a boy. It wasn’t at a bar; it was at Spacey’s space. Could alcohol have played a role? Sure. I just don’t know how drunk you have to be to think it’s okay to come on to someone who is fourteen.

The bigger debate centers around those gay bars between men, not minors. One man says he was groped by Spacey at a bar and suffered Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome as a result. That’s where many seem to side with #TeamSpacey. Some say the other guy must have been homophobic to have such a strong, lingering reaction. Others say groping is a normal act in gay bars. There is no history of gays asserting power over gays, like the advantage men have had over women. Men can be cavemen and, without a woman in the mix, one can expect caveman actions. There’s never been a social check to tell gay men that groping is not okay in a gay environment like gay bars.

I was offended the first times I was groped. What just happened?! Often, the contact came on a crowded dance floor or as a friend and I circulated through the swarms of men packed into a West Hollywood club at midnight on a Saturday night. It was like that grade school “prank” where someone taps you on the shoulder, you turn around and no one claims responsibility. It would happen over and over as classmates laughed. Annoying until you figured out who did it. Then you laughed along with the group, relieved to finally be in on the joke.

In the crowded gay bar, anonymous groping happened. One friend or another would say, “I just got my ass grabbed.” Depending on the groper and or the gropee, the reaction was “Ewwww” or “Congratulations!”

I was always incensed. To be sure, I wanted to be noticed. I wanted a boyfriend and, in the late ‘80s/early ‘90s, the gay bar seemed like the best option. (Seems sad when I type that.) An ex of mine in L.A. said I had a perpetual deer-in-the-headlights look to everything. And he meant everything, gay or otherwise. Like I was some country bumpkin when I was actually a nice, naïve Canadian boy who happened upon Los Angeles by way of Texas. (It stunned me that everything about that self-description was considered a turnoff to most guys I met.)

For the record, I never took my shirt off in a gay bar either.

Part shyness, part body image issue, part common sense.

As long as I didn’t share anything about myself, I remained grope-worthy, at least to a few. Some weren’t even all that drunk. I never suffered PTSD. Groping was part of the gay bar ambience, along with all that smoke that seeped into my clothes, skin and lungs. The fact I found groping offensive made me feel like a bad gay. If it was someone I wasn’t into which was almost always the case—friends said I was too picky (Uh,…thanks?)—the grope was too forward, too creepy. On the rare occasion, I thought the guy was hot, the act left me confused. Is that like a bad pickup line? What am I supposed to do now? Grope back? Why couldn’t he have just said hi?

“You just need to get laid,” a peripheral friend would say. But then he’d disappear for the rest of the night to,…you know.

To be sure, I wanted to be noticed. I wanted a boyfriend and, in the late ‘80s/early ‘90s, the gay bar seemed like the best option. (Seems sad when I type it.)

“You can’t be so sensitive,” a closer friend said. “And don’t you think he’s kinda cute?”

Miss you, Mary.

The answer was usually “No” and occasionally “Not anymore.” And then ten or fifteen minutes later, I’d say goodbye to whoever was still present in my little group of barflies, walk back alone to my parking spot, closer to The Beverly Center than the bars, and drive home, wondering, What’s wrong with me? Is this what gay is all about? Wasn’t the theme from the “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” supposed to be my song? What if I don’t make it after all? (Maybe I should’ve been more literal with my inspiration and followed Mary Richards to Minneapolis.)

My indignation made me a fuddy-duddy. I was out but still an outsider. Frequently I’d ask, “Is this all there is?” although I learned to keep the question in my head after the fuddy-duddy label. (I gave it to myself. People would just hear me rant, put their drink down and say, “Yeah, I think I’m going to check out the scene at Micky’s.”)

Basically, the feedback I got—expressly or otherwise—was that groping was just part of the gay bar scene. It’s what gays do along with drinking too much, taking Ecstasy and staring at the crotches of go-go boys. Too much real conversation was overrated, a buzz killer.

I revisited L.A. a few months before I turned fifty (I’m still pretending that was just yesterday) and some of the same friends and I found ourselves back in the same West Hollywood Clubs. There was a déjà-vu as the peripheral friend dumped us within the first forty-five minutes, leaving with a muscled twenty-something as though nothing had changed. At Rage, we danced and I got groped by a sexy man two decades younger than me. Instead of outrage, I was flattered, a sad reaction to what I’d always shunned. I knew all too well that I’d reached pasture-grazing status in the gay world. I didn’t have a beach home in Huntington Beach or drive a Mercedes or have personal trainer sessions three times a week like my ageless, never-worked-a-day-in-his-life peripheral friend. This ass grab made me feel noticed and younger. The guy didn’t even flee the bar when I turned and he saw my face in the admittedly dim lighting. Later, my group drifted to Revolver and yet again I got groped by another attractive younger guy. Still no indignation. Still flattered. I was a hypocrite. I was that desperate to feel young again, to feel looked at—even with a leer—instead of being looked past.

Maybe it is time for a new etiquette in what few gay bars remain. Before my time, I’d heard about sex in dark corners and backrooms but, at least to my knowledge, those things were the lore of an earlier generation. And, thankfully, I never had to figure out the colored hanky codes. We’ve done away with smoking in clubs. Perhaps it’s time for kamikaze groping to be retired, too. Should be easy to do away with. Anyone who wants random contact can hookup online or at some outdoor site that’s widely talked about on other internet sites. Maybe the clubs can turn up the lights a notch and people can actually get to know one another through sustained conversation. If we go retro, let us “Vogue” without that extra hand movement. Can we stop the anonymous groping in bars or is this still the wishful thinking of a (hypocritical) old fogy?