I could, perhaps, find some other way to say what I’m about to say. But that would just be an attempt to evade the resounding truth, not just of the sentence itself, but of the connotations contained therein. In light of that, you hereby have the author’s permission to read the following statement through the lens of prejudice it so richly deserves: Some of my best friends are gay.
Don’t hold back, now. Yes, this is the “Some of my best friends are gay,” that fits into the fine tradition of such guilt-inspired sentiment as “Some of my best friends are black,” “Some of my best friends are women” or “I actually think we should go out for Afghan tonight,” and it demands the same treatment. That is, it demands swift and immediate derision.
But don’t get me wrong; this is derision in the of-course-you’re-right-I-just-can’t-believe-you-were-enough-of-a-tool-to-feel-the-need-to-say-that-as-if-it-were-controversial sense of the word, not the harboring-a-less-than-hostile-attitude-towards-homosexuals-is-just-cause-for-an-unabashed-critique-of-you-as-a-person one.
Now, those of you who are familiar with this phenomenon know that “Some of my best friends are gay” is usually located within a discourse either directly before or after some disinterested party says something offensive. So, slave to form that I am, I hope you won’t be too irritated if I start over:
I’d like to reintroduce the words “gay” and “homo” into the English slang lexicon. But don’t let that offend you. After all, some of my best friends are gay.
Seriously though, I feel as though my slang vocabulary just hasn’t been the same since, oh, I’d say it was around 1994, when my social conscience stem cells started to develop at a really obnoxious rate. No SAT “hit list” term, no Microsoft Word thesaurus embellishment, will ever fill the gap created by the meddlings of what Kurt Cobain referred to as the “anally p.c.” zeitgeist (which, coincidentally, was an SAT hit list word) of the early to mid ‘90s.
I can feel the wholeness of this abdominal void in the way it threatens to collapse my sternum into my pelvis every time I listen to Belle & Sebastian and struggle to complete a thought: “This music is so … so …” So what? Or (and this might be a window into my take on the whole singer/songwriter genre) whenever I behold the aesthetic melodrama of a Simon & Garfunkel album cover and wonder, “Now what kind of guys are these?”
Well, I’ve derived the impetus for this campaign from no less of an authority than the chief executive himself, who, about a month ago, told me, as an American, to “steel” my resolve. Fuckin’ A, W. Here goes:
The music that Belle & Sebastian makes is gay. And Simon and Garfunkel? Well, those guys are homos.
Ahhhhhhh. It’s like my inner-child has just found his inner-brother’s secret stash of pornos. And it is that inner-child that I have to thank for this latest insensitivity. He was the one who, through all these years of legitimately sobering exposure to the negative side-effects of even “innocent” uses of these terms, maintained a willfully-ignorant attitude. It is he who, through the implementation of such vagaries as irony and postmodern theory, I finally feel comfortable unleashing upon the world, if only in small doses.
Irony? Fine, that’s easy enough. A skillful literary hand can use irony to craft a non-threatening and even progressive message out of all but the most controversial realities. Unfortunately, a subject as sensitive as the reintroduction of offensive, traditionally-bigotted terms might just fall into that category of things and events?alongside the Holocaust, domestic violence and Sept. 11?for which irony just can’t compete with the gravity of the issue, and the reader simply labels as bad taste.
But in postmodernism, with its specific implications for language as well as its tested manifestations in works of art, we are offered exciting new possibilities. Postmodernism teaches us that the hierarchy is long-dead, that whatever unified idea that once tied all the disparate elements of our world together and referred their meanings, through an interconnected web of associations, to some larger meaning, is not there anymore. So now we are left with a confusing sea of symbols and ideas that have been severed from their place within an ordered structure. Artists have capitalized upon the public appreciation of these isolated meanings in order to convey their own messages. When Don Delillo, in his book White Noise, wants to represent the generator of anxiety that has been traditionally represented metaphorically in literature as a cloud that hangs menacingly over the characters’ heads (but can literally turn out to be anything from a forbidden love to an impending war), he dispenses with literary convention and simply introduces a menacing, toxic cloud into his text and lets that symbol stand on its own.
And it does. And in this same way, we can learn to appreciate “gay” and “homo” as they should be, severed from their dated associations with homophobia and as signifiers of concepts that no other words can as economically capture. When I say that Belle & Sebastian is gay, I’m not associating that band or that music with homosexuals or homosexual culture. And anybody who says that I am is the one who is carrying the negative baggage. Sure, I am trying to convey a sense of ineffectuality, impotence, softness and melodrama, but any suggestion that this means that I’m feminizing Belle & Sebastian is rooted in the equating of women with these admittedly negative ideas. And even if that were to hold up, the correlation between the “feminine” and the “gay” is rooted in such outdated “inversion” theories of homosexuality that it demands nothing more than a dismissive chortle.
If all this works out, and I sincerely hope it does, then there will be a day in the future when all of my friends and I will be able to sit down and debate the relative gayness of some cultural event, whether it be a “very special” sit-com episode, a Robin Williams movie or the Backstreet Boys’ latest. And yes, you can rest assured that, of all those friends who will convene, some of them?some of the very best?will be gay.
