Gay = Shit.
Anyone who knows my work also knows that I’m a stickler for all devious language and hidden context; of how the uber-right hide their meanings behind the agendas they so neatly posit in their language. And how claiming of the language first (e.g. pro-life) automatically makes everyone else the opposite (anti-life). What Shakespeare used to call a ‘jade’s trick’.
But should we actually use the word ‘Gay’ anymore?
It is the G of the LGBT acronym, after all. We have gay men and Lesbians. Trans can encompass an entire array of statuses, always fluid, because to be in a state of trans is exactly as it sounds, no matter where you are on the trans spectrum. Everyone represented under the LGBT umbrella is supposed to also be within Queer but queer ‘others’ are in there too. If we think of the globe being run by predominantly white straight men, anyone who isn’t the straight white male version, is therefore queer. This makes the numbers of queers far greater than that of straight white men, making queers the majority.
As you all know Homosexuality has been around longer than Heterosexuality.
Don’t believe me? Well, when the jolly Victorians needed a ‘label’ for low-life male fellators, they came up with the term Homosexual. Some time later they needed to come up with a term for ‘Everybody else’ and this is when heterosexuality was actually born - somewhere in the nineteenth century. Unfortunately for the world, this means that Homosexuality is older than Heterosexuality, but then - at the end of the day – it’s just labels.
As with our queer sexualities, we define ourselves as we see fit, so if I chose to call myself a sleazy cum-bucket faggot, that’s my choice.
And since context is everything, if we hear someone screaming about a bunch of low life faggots on a 1960’s newsreel we know what it really means. I have no problem referring to myself as a dirty stinking rotten filthy homo because at the end of the day, I’m really the only one who knows this is actually true. When anyone else says it, it becomes another label.
Gay icons are something entirely different. They are something we are collectively supposed to adore and consume. Madonna and Lady GaGa keep the argument going -just think of the revenue loss if they didn’t. In fact without ‘gay’ in their lexicon, these gals wouldn’t get another pay check. But this ‘Gay iconography’ isn’t me - so what happens if I don’t identify as that kind of gay. The fact is, quite a lot of my own ‘gay’ icons are actually straight. In fact, there are only small elements within my gay icons that actually speak to me - not the whole package.
So is it the ‘Gay’ industries that are worried that the very word ‘gay’ is being cheapened by a bunch of school kids? How are you going to sell a ‘gay lifestyle’ when you’re really selling a ‘crap lifestyle’ or whatever the new definition is. Answer – don’t sell a ‘gay’ life style in the first place. It’s a capitalist construct!
One of my favorite Gay Icons was a man called Vladimir Lenin. And just because he’s not in the back pages of certain magazines doesn’t mean to say he’s not a gay icon. In fact I challenge anyone whose ever seen his embalmed body in the Mausoleum in Red Square to tell me otherwise, I’ve seen some bad make-up jobs in my time, but this is real K-hole stuff. Now, Lenin famously said that Capitalism eats everything in its path, it consumes everything and then shits out its own version. Now, I don’t want to sound like the last commie standing but the organisers of Pride might benefit from some early 20th century political reading. Pride is about money and, since gay icons such as Madonna and the rest are also about money and consuming cultures before regurgitating them as their own, I think it’s a marriage made in heaven/hell.
Maybe it’s good for the LGBT acronym to fall. We’ve already left out intersex and a whole host of personal gender sexuality definitions, anyhow. The fact of the matter is that we’ve crammed ourselves in the same closet for so long as a matter of survival, we surely can’t expect the low-life underground boudoir to remain closed.
I think the greatest indicator of this failure is the silent ‘B’ and the bi-phobia that exists both within and outside of the LGBT barricades. Just like Victorian England where Lesbians were never even acknowledged, it leads us back to the fact that the word ‘Gay’ is a means of offence – a male insult thrown only at other males.
A few years ago I wrote an article about how I met Quentin Crisp when he was touring with his Evening with Quentin Crisp show and ended up in my hometown. Thirty people turned up of which I, still a schoolboy, was one. After the show I sat in the foyer with Quentin and talked. What I didn’t realize at the time was that I was inadvertently asking him what the whole gay thing meant.
I’ve often wondered if he made it up there and then when he told me that GAY was actually a political term, something that carried a coded meaning. He told me that codes and metaphors were to become a new language for me within my new sexual identity - it was, after all, the coded language of my history. He told me that GAY actually stood for ‘Good As You’. Important words to a seventeen-year-old. So I’m calling for all Gay Pride events to now be named ‘Good As You festivals’ in honor of our dear Quentin.
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