Gay Pride Month has started to resemble that song, “How Do You Keep the Music Playing?”
It’s a challenge for civil rights movements that have had success. How do you find new things to protest?
You create new outrages.
When a man named David Eugene Pierce, living as a woman named Gigi Eugene Pierce, was shot in Portland, Ore., last month the death was cited in Gay Pride coverage as evidence of a war on transgender people.
More likely the shooting wasn’t that different from violence that occurs between heterosexuals. (Sophia Adler, who was living in a women’s shelter, was arrested on suspicion of shooting Pierce after she allegedly thought the latter was going to punch her.)
As Gay Pride month winds down, some of the more forlorn spectacles of this year’s coverage were photos in the media that long ago lost their shock effect: Fat haunches in G-strings. Men kissing men. Women kissing women.
At the First Congregational Church in downtown Portland, a sign in the window said, “God Loves Queer Sex.” As if to offer reassurance to old-fashioned straights who haven’t transitioned to the gay or bi-life, a sign in another window said, “God Loves Sex.”
It reduces gay men and women, who have gone about their daily lives for years — working, raising families, occupying the political spectrum — to their sex lives, as if that were the most important thing about them. There are gay activists who cling to this differentiation, even though it really isn’t that different anymore.
It’s like The New Yorker cartoon by Joe Dator that shows a young man slumped on an ottoman facing his extended family and pets while his dad explains: “Son, your mother and I, Grandpa Jack, Grandma Kate, Uncle Danny, Aunt Sue, Grandpa Sy, Grandma Jenny, Cousin Rhonda, Tigger and Sprinkles are gay.”
Today, the media have to reach to make gay rights look bold and different. That might explain their embrace of transgender and “gender fluidity.”
Even The New York Times resorted to this. Among its recent offerings was a feature on “top surgery” – females who have their breast tissue surgically removed, leaving them with nipples on flat chests.
Linden Crawford described with a touch of swagger how she showed off her new, flat chest by visiting a public swimming pool.
“I got in trouble there last year for wearing a tank top. ‘No street clothes,’ they said. … This time when I sign in I leave the gender column blank. … I walk to the deep end, slip out of the tank top, and jump in as fast as I can. My chest is bare, in public, for the first time in my life.”
Later, she wears a see-through black mesh shirt and stops at a 24-hour restaurant where the man at the counter keeps glancing at her chest.
“I let him look. I know it’s confusing.”
Many transgender stories sound like a quest for attention. The subjects act as if we are all riveted by their physical appearance.
The media feed this sexual self-absorption, making it seem healthy and normal. It adds to the contradictory obsession of singling out your tribe, then demanding acceptance and inclusion.
Several years ago, casual references to “queer and caramel” started appearing in the news and popular culture.
“Statistically, we’re headed towards an age where everybody’s going to be, like, caramel and queer,” actress Ilana Glazer said on her TV show, “Broad City.”
This assumption has set up unrealistic expectations.
Last year New York writer Gregory Allen described a late-night encounter he had with a woman at a CVS drug store who was berating a cashier. When Allen intervened, the woman told him to mind his own business, then she later added, “What, didn’t your boyfriend get you off right last night? Fuck off.”
He came back with, “Oh, so you’re a homophobe?”
The encounter escalated with her calling him a faggot and him ruminating: “(B)eing called a faggot in the safe-space ‘queer and caramel’ progressive cesspool of liberal idealism we call New York City … frankly threw me off. What business does this homophobe have in my queer city?”
If Allen had appeared to be heterosexual, the woman might have insulted him by saying, “What, didn’t your girlfriend get you off right last night?”
In which case, he could have put her down for being unsophisticated and not seeing he was gay. He wants to be accepted, but is he prepared to accept her?
We complicate our lives unnecessarily. Like the grandmother who sees her first-grader grandson playing with dolls and, instead of simply letting him be, rushes out to buy him nail polish and cosmetics. By the time he reaches adolescence, will his focus be on school or declaring a sexual orientation?
Or the heterosexual who practically demands that a married gay couple she knows hold hands in her presence to affirm her liberal generosity. The gay couple has been together 16 years. They are about as excited to hold hands as any other long-time married couple.
Once we are all queer and caramel, how will we find new ways to be noticed?
– Pamela Fitzsimmons
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I’ve never heard the phrase queer and caramel. I’ll be dead when America comes to that.. If Trump had any imagination he’d forget the wall and put up signs ar the border. “Welcome to the once mighty U.S., now queer and caramel, where your sons can wear high heels and your can daughters can pretend to have dicks!!!”
I haven’t heard that phrase either. Your mention about sons in high heels, you know boys can wear high heels in high school. There was a story out of Calif. that got lots of publicity where a one student shot another kid in class. The boy killed dressed like a girl and made passes at another guy who didn’t like it and fought back with a gun. The teachers had encouraged the boy-girl. They bought him a dress and high heels and told the other kids they had to accpt him.
Thanks for the comments, TGIR and G. Sanchez.
You’re being facetious, I’m sure, about the sign at the border. Something the pro-illegal immigrant side does not consider is that many immigrants bring their country’s conservative social standards with them.
About the California story. These things make a big splash and then disappear. It was in a junior high, not high school. The L.A. Times has a good overview: “(Brendan) McInerney shot Larry King in a school computer lab at E.O. Green Junior High in Oxnard in February 2008, after days of conflict between the boys. Students and teachers at the trial testified that King had been dressing in women’s accessories and wearing makeup, and was flirting aggressively with male students on campus who did not want the attention.”
Larry King went by the name “Leticia” when he dressed as a girl.
“School administrators sent a memo advising teachers to give King his space, but to report safety problems.
“Teachers at the trial testified that when they tried to report growing tensions between King and several boys, school leaders shunned them.
“The victim’s mother, Dawn King, revealed … she had contacted school officials four days before the shooting in an effort to solicit their cooperation in toning down her son’s behavior. … She said she was told that her son had a civil right to explore his sexual identity.”
That gives you a flavor for what happened.
McInerney’s first trial ended in a hung jury that was 7-5 in his favor. He later agreed to a plea deal and will be in prison until he is at least 38 years old.
How did a great country get so fucked up? The McInerney kid was being stalked by another kid dressed up like a Girl I guess the adults thought it was cute. I like to say I’m glad I’m retired but I fear for my grandkids when I hear story like the one in the Times. What about the kids who want to go to school and not worry about sex. Trump ought pardon the McInerny kid.
The president can only pardon in federal cases — not criminals convicted in state court. That would have been one hell of an outcry had Trump tried to pardon McInerney during Gay Pride Month. It would have sidelined the immigration protests for a while.
America the Ideal has always been a great country. The reality has always been something else, an amalgam of great and not-so-great.
Hello Pamela I would like to get in contact with you. We met in 1996 when you were covering a story for The Sun in San Bernardino about the 11 year old girl who shot two boys, My son Evan was one of them. Please email me if you can.