If being gay was a choice, I’d choose gay every time. Not because I think it’s better to be gay than straight (Note: Although sometimes….). Rather, it’s because making any other choice would mean that I wouldn’t be myself.
Now, how’s that for pride month???
Oh please, no applause.
Every person I know and almost everyone I’ve ever met in the LGBTQ+ community would answer the same way. Because once you have zero compunction about being your authentic self and actually live that way, the toughest part of that particular journey is over.
As for the handful of perverse exceptions on the subject, well, as practically everyone on earth aside from a MAGA politician will publicly admit, there is a streak of the depraved within EVERY community.
Meaning there are lots of ways to be gay. Just as there are lots of ways to be pretty much anything.
This week I watched the fantastic HBO documentary, Pee Wee As Himself. It tells the story of Paul Reubens, the late actor who invented and played Pee Wee Herman all those years and who, among other things, officially “comes out’ as gay on the program.
Not that we imagined he was straight. Or anything else. Pee Wee was camp and camp done by a man scores very high on the gay meter. Like 9 out of 10. And yes, I know that Dame Edna was played by the late Barry Humphries, a straight man. He’s the 1 out of 10.
Which in public gay speak is 1 out of every 10,000.
In any event, the fact that Paul Reubens was gay is nowhere near the most interesting aspect of his life, or his story. What‘s much more revelatory is that this little gay kid was a natural performance artist fascinated by the circus (Note: He grew up near Ringling Bros. HQ in Sarasota, FL), children’s television and mid-century kitsch. And that he was a Cal Arts grad who had a boyfriend in his twenties but was so obsessed with rising to the top of show business that after their breakup he poured everything into his career rather than to ever lose himself or his ambitions ever again in the homo-normative narrative of gay domestic bliss.
Toiling in the usual rounds of anonymous auditions, improv comedy, bit parts and more, he one day finally hit upon a strange character that managed to suffuse himself, and everything he loved, in the form of an oddball man-boy who could entertain all the oddball kids, their older siblings AND their parents. But in an honest, hyper-colorful, strange and wittily sarcastic style that was both purely him and purely for the “him” who would’ve liked to have (or been) such a person when he was younger.
It’s a story that is not much different from that of many creative people in the entertainment industry, only with overwhelming, outsized mainstream success.
Sure there were personal lapses and dramas like the arrest at the porn theatre for supposedly exposing himself or the subsequent cancellation of his Saturday morning kids (ahem) syndicated TV series, Pee Wee’s Playhouse — which my husband and I used to watch almost every Saturday morning early in our courtship – waiting for the inevitable gay double entendres that would always come (Note:”You know what they say about big feet…”).
But, like being gay, those were just moments in a life of creativity that was clearly formed by being a bit odd and a bit of an outsider, albeit with an obsession to stay that way and become an INSIDER through the imaginative expression of EXACTLY who you are.
The character of Pee Wee and the guy who created him was as gay as anything could be because it was NEVER about his gender or sexuality, or the gender/sexuality of those millions who were attracted to him. It was the fact that he was using who he really was to attract everybody together in one big playhouse. And that’s the most appealing, most successful and most enduring attraction of all. #OneBigTent.
Of course, this a fact that is impossible to explain to self-professed “real” men like our current Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, or as he is known as around our house, Brylcreem Boy.
Yes, it’s a dated reference, but so is he. Type casting for a school bully out of the 1950s, down to the drunken rages, mistreatment of women and financial failures.
After the April debacle where he set up group chats and leaked plans for US military raids by using the unsecured internet line, Signal Chat, B.B’.s new plan is to remove the names off of any Navy ships that he claims don’t further his “warrior” agenda for the troops. And rename them with something more appropriate to his “mission.” At the top of the list this pride month (Note: And likely to reassign him to the name Petty Pete in our household), is the USNS Harvey Milk, christened in honor of the slain gay rights leader and former San Francisco Supervisor who was gunned down in his office at City Hall one morning late in 1978 by a guy who didn’t like his politics.
Ironically, though not to Petty Pete, aka Brylcreem Boy, is that Mr. Milk was the quintessential warrior. After four years in the Navy, where he served on a submarine rescue ship during the Korean War, he was forced to resign when his superiors found out he was gay. Never comfortable with hiding who he was, he then went on to become the first openly gay person elected to public office in California, and the following year put his career on the line to defeat the then popular-in-the-polls Briggs Initiative, which would have made it unconstitutional for any gay person to teach in a California school, as well as ended the careers of any of those who already did so.
Mr. Milk prevailed and thanks to him we not only have gay teachers but millions of out gay people living proudly all over the world. He imagined the latter dream in countless public speeches but, much like many other civil rights leaders, didn’t survive nearly long enough to see that become reality. Nor did he stay alive long enough (Note: he was forty-eight when he was murdered) to see a U.S. president decide to honor him, a former navy lieutenant, for his courage by putting his name on one of its ships.
Unsurprisingly, Mr. Milk is just one on a longer list of names that P.P. or B.B. (Note: Take your choice), and one assumes the bosses above him in the current White House, are seeking to erase from history in our government by claiming they were only put there in the first place because of some undeserved bow to diversity, equity and inclusion. Additional Navy ships scheduled to be stripped of their names are the:
USNS Harriet Tubman
USNS Thurgood Marshall
USNS Medgar Evers
USNS Cesar Chavez
USNS Dolores Huerta
USNS Ruth Bader Ginsburg
USNS Lucy Stone
The gays, the Blacks, the Browns, the Jews and the Women (not necessarily in that order).
Well, those names may be temporarily erased from a Navy battleship but they will never be erased from American history. Not by a secretary of defense who thinks branding his body with a series of white Christian nationalist tattoos is enough to make him a contemporary warrior.
Most Americans see him as a callow idiot, one of many teeny tiny man-boys in our collective pasts.
Far more petty, and far less notable than Pee-Wee Herman himself.
notes from a chair 