Skipping Towards Gomorrah (31 page)

A well-accessorized religion.

No one has ever gone broke underestimating the insecurities of the gay and lesbian consumer. In every city large enough to have a pride parade, there's a store dedicated to selling “pride merchandise” year-round. Gay people who don't get their fill of gay-is-good at their annual pride parades can fill their apartments with bric-a-brack that reinforces the gay-is-good message any day of the year. Rainbow stickers for our cars, rainbow flags for our front porches and balconies, rainbow drinking glasses for our tables, rainbow Christmas-tree lights for the holidays, rainbow windsocks for . . . for our wind, I guess. Ye Olde Gay Pride Shoppe near my house sells rainbow-striped dog collars for men and women into bondage and S&M.

It gets worse. A gay mail-order company that advertises in porn magazines sells a line of pride merchandise. Right under the Make Your Own Dildo Kit ($69.95) and the latest fuck-and-suck video, there's a small box with a selection of pride merchandise. Feeling something less than prideful? You can order up a Pride Nuts Necklace (“Don your nuts as an everyday accessory and know that you're doing your part for gay visibility!” $7.95), Pride Chrome Chain Anklet (“It's elegantly masculine, and it will be noticed by all the right guys!” $7.95), Pride Teddy Bear (“Wuz Fuzzy Wuzzy Gay? Wuz he? . . . The perfect gift for your favorite Gay Teddy Bear Collector!” $29.95), Pride Pet Bowl (“Let your dog chow down with Pride!” $19.95), and Pride CD (“Take pride in hosting your very own circuit party!” $19.95). For those who want to feel proud inside and out, there's—I hope you're sitting down, Mr. Bennett—the Pride Plug, “a fulfilling anal plug in the classic sensual shape,” a steal at $17.95 (large) or $14.95 (small). Buyers are admonished to “wear your Pride Plug proudly!”

First of all, you don't “wear” a butt plug. You insert it. And how, I wonder, do the makers of Pride Plugs avoid selling their “fulfilling” plugs to people who might wear them with feelings of shame or despair? Perhaps they don't ship to Utah. Or Vatican City. And what's to stop jaded homos in Chicago or Los Angeles from wearing their Pride Plugs with feelings of indifference?

All this pride pimping would be funny, I suppose, if it weren't helping to create a gay culture equal parts intellectual vapidity and moral obtuseness. These days, the hurdles to coming out are so much lower than they used to be (in general—individual circumstances vary), and yet the insistence that we take pride in being gay grows stronger and louder with each passing year. Being accepted by your family and comfortably out at work are the rules now, not the exceptions. (A gay man I met who works at a viciously anti-gay right-wing magazine—he works in design, not editorial, he's quick to point out—brings his boyfriend to company dinners.) Since gays and lesbians no longer have to struggle against
outrageous
levels of parental hostility,
extreme
social pressure, or
toxic
levels of homophobia, emerging as a relatively healthy gay person simply isn't the accomplishment it used to be. That means, of course, that we have
less
to take pride in now than we used to. So perhaps it's time to ratchet down the self-congratulatory “gay pride” rhetoric, retire the windsocks, and insert those butt plugs for pleasure, not pride.
⁸

Since the pride gays and lesbians are instructed to feel can't attach itself to the struggle to overcome the ever-smaller obstacles to being openly gay, it simply attaches itself to being gay, period. In thirty years we've gone from, “You're gay, and you should be proud of yourself for surviving the bullshit, overcoming the obstacles, and emerging as a reasonably healthy adult,” to “You're gay! Be proud! Buy a butt plug!” Anything that can be construed as an expression of gayness—wearing anklets, using sex toys, dragging someone around on a leash—is something to take pride in.

Don't get me wrong. There's nothing wrong with anklets, butt plugs, and leashes. (Though there is something deeply distressing about grown men who collect teddy bears.) I've worn two of the three things on that list. If using a butt plug gives someone pleasure, well, he should be encouraged to pursue that pleasure. It's his inalienable right, after all. Butt plug consumers harm no one and keep those butt-plug factories humming, which is good for our economy. But buying a butt plug or putting on an anklet that lets “all the right guys” know you're gay isn't something that should fill anyone with pride. Butt plugs, anklets, and dog collars may be a good time, but they're not accomplishments.

By far the biggest problem with “gay is good” is that so many gay people—especially those fetishized gay youth—fall for it. I don't remember much about my first pride parade: I was eighteen years old, living in Chicago, and arrived at the pride parade drunker than I'd ever been in my life. There was lots of booze flowing at the pre-parade party I attended, and I was too young to know my limits. (I'm from a family of heavy drinkers and at eighteen assumed I must have the high-alcohol tolerance gene. Imagine how crushed I was to learn that two beers can do me in.) Clearly, I exceeded my limits that Sunday afternoon; I think I threw up in some bushes along the route.

As embarrassing as my behavior was that day, I'm most embarrassed to report that I fell for it—and fell hard. The usual gay pride rhetoric was spilling forth from the stage at the post-parade rally: gay is good; gay people are your brothers and sisters; each and every member of the gay community cares about each and every other member of the gay community; it's all about love and caring and respect. I had made it safely out of the closet and somehow managed to make it out of high school without getting pounded to a pulp. Still, it wasn't until I made it to my first pride parade that I finally felt safe. I was in a huge crowd of gay people! My brothers and sisters! Michelangelo! Oscar Wilde! Gertrude Stein! No one could hurt me anymore! Not with all my gay brothers looking out for me! I bought some gay T-shirts and pierced my gay ears and put on some gay buttons. All in all it was a beautiful, moving day in June. I was proud.

Come October, I was being stalked by one violent ex-boyfriend, pressured into sex by an older gay man I mistook for a friend, and taking antibiotics to clear up a sexually transmitted disease given to me by my recent ex-boyfriend's soon-to-be ex-boyfriend. The scales fell from my eyes. Gay people—myself included—weren't necessarily good. The realization that no one was looking out for me, that I would have to be as on my guard in the “gay community” as I had been in high school, crushed me. And while the homophobic jocks in school could only beat me up, gay men who took advantage of my youth and inexperience could break my heart.

Gay men weren't good—and they weren't my brothers, like I heard at the pride parade. I should have known. I mean, I have two brothers, actual biological siblings, and neither one had ever given me a hickey, an STD, or a rope burn. Why was I told to regard other gay men as my “brothers”? We certainly don't tell young straight girls to think of older straight men are their
brothers.
We tell them to be careful around straight men who take an interest in them, as their motives probably aren't entirely pure. So why, as a teenager, was I being told that older gay men were my brothers? Why are gay teenagers still being told this appalling lie? Because telling young gay people the truth—lots of gay men are manipulative, horny abusers, just like lots of straight men—might give some people the impression that some gay men do things they should be ashamed of, not proud of.

What gay youth need to be told is what I learned that bruising summer: It doesn't matter
that
a person is gay, it matters
how
a person is gay. It's a pretty simple distinction and, from an adult vantage point, a fairly obvious one. But I've never heard anyone make this distinction during a speech at a gay pride parade—which someone really should do if pride parades are for gay youth. All you hear at gay pride parades—and all you read in the dull gay magazines (which is to say, all you read in
all
gay magazines)—is gay is good, gay community, gay brothers and sisters. “Gay is good” is just as big a lie as “Gay is bad,” one that's almost as destructive, a lie that would be self-evident if it were not for the gay pride idiocracy. John Wayne Gacy was gay; Jeffrey Dahmer was gay; Andrew Cunanan was gay. There are gay men out there giving other gay men HIV on purpose; lesbian murderers sit on death row; some gay men kick their dogs and beat their lovers and wear anklets. Once a gay kid comes out, the people most likely to fuck him over or harm him or take advantage of him are other gay men, not big, bad straight bigots.

I learned all of this the hard way. I didn't learn it reading gay magazines or attending gay pride parades or at the feet of HIV/AIDS prevention educators (who seem most concerned with maximizing the amount of sex a gay man has rather than minimizing his risk of contracting HIV). Going to gay pride parades when I was a kid didn't help me. Gay pride hurt me.

 

K
evin and Jake were going to an all-night rave the night before the parade. I wanted to sleep. Despite the fact that they'd known me less than six hours, Kevin and Jake left me alone in their new house; the gay-is-good assumption was working to my advantage in this instance. The same assumption that got me into so much trouble as a young adult led Kevin and Jake to give me the benefit of the doubt. Since I was gay and I knew someone they knew, and the person we knew in common was also gay, Kevin and Jake assumed I wouldn't rent a truck and empty the house or rummage through their porn collection while they were out dancing. And I probably wouldn't have rummaged through their porn tapes if they hadn't been stacked right on top of the VCR.

The next day—pride day!—we drove to the home of Kevin's business partner, Tim, who lived close to the start of the parade route. The plan was for all of Tim's friends to park at his house, have a few drinks, and then walk (walk! in L.A.!) the seven or so blocks to Santa Monica Boulevard. An extremely attractive, short, athletic blond with an impossibly beautiful body, Tim was running around shirtless when we arrived. Tim was highly strung and a little effeminate—character traits that derailed his acting career. On the drive over, Kevin told me that Tim just spent thirty thousand dollars having all of his teeth capped by Britney Spears's dentist.

“Say something nice about his teeth,” Kevin instructed me.

Tim was running around the house when we arrived, donning and doffing T-shirts in an effort to put together the perfect pride parade look. With the exception of the T-shirts scattered all over the living room, his house was immaculate (
Architectural Digest
was shooting it the next day), with examples of Kevin's and Tim's stylish and outrageously expensive light fixtures, floor lamps, and wall sconces dominating every room. The place was also packed with people when we arrived. Tim's friends were mostly men, each one tanner and more muscular than the next, with the exception of the one fat-and-funny faggot cracking jokes from the couch and a butch/glam lesbian couple more at home with gay men than with other lesbians. As far as I could tell, there was no one in the house who needed a dose of gay-is-good affirmation; everyone seemed hip, secure, and successful. No one at Tim's house looked to be racked with feelings of shame—least of all Tim.

“It's not about the floats,” Tim told me when I asked him why he was going to the parade. Tim ordered me to follow him upstairs so we could talk while he continued his search for the perfect T-shirt. “The parade is about love. Love, dammit! Write that in your little notebook, mister. And it's about laughing at the freaks.”

Again with the freaks. How, I asked Tim, could the parade be about love
and
laughing at the freaks? How does one reconcile those impulses?

“Well,” said Tim, “I guess freaks get to laugh at us, too. We all laugh at each other, and that makes it fair.”

“But the parade is really for people who are just coming out,” a tan, toothy man standing in the door interjected. “It's really for all the gay kids.”

Again with the gay kids!

I was going to ask Tan Man to elaborate, but he seemed pretty enthralled by Tim's T-shirt show. He might be Tim's boyfriend, I thought, and if he wasn't, he was going to be soon. Tim settled on a pair of baggy cargo shorts, a white half T-shirt that showed off his flat stomach, and big, blue-tinted sunglasses. I complimented the lamps next to his bed before we headed back downstairs.

“Do you like it?” Tim said. “It's one of my designs. Four thousand dollars for the pair. Janet Jackson bought eight pairs last week.”

I was still in shock (two-thousand-dollar lamps?!) ten minutes later when we marched out of Tim's house and headed towards Santa Monica Boulevard.

“We're our own parade,” Tim announced.

At an intersection blocks from Tim's house, our little group encountered a sweaty, miserable straight guy trying to push a stalled truck down the street and steer at the same time. Without being asked, five tan fags from our parade ran up and started pushing the miserable straight guy's truck. The straight guy hopped into the cab. After being pushed by fags for more than a block, he was able to start his truck and drive off, waving his thanks to all the beautiful tan fags who helped him out.

“It's all about love,” Tim said, pointing at my notebook. “You write that down, mister. Love. Love and lamps. That's what it's all about.”

 

T
he Celebrity Grand Marshal at the L.A. gay pride parade was a horse-faced comedienne who played a supporting role on a long-canceled, completely unremarkable sitcom. Her show ran in the shadow of Seinfeld for a few years, and now the comedienne divides her time between celebrity installments of
The Weakest Link
and the taxing business of marshaling gay-pride parades. To be fair, the comedienne was the best thing on her show but, nevertheless, I had a hard time figuring out what qualified her to be the grand marshal. Her sense of humor? Her red hair? Her presumed support for gay rights? (
Presumed
because I've never heard her say a word about gay equality.) Seeing as she was the
celebrity
grand marshal, did that mean there were other, equally grand, noncelebrity marshals waving from other convertibles somewhere else along the parade route?