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11 June, 1999
Speculating about celebrity sexual lives has been a passtime in our society for about as long as there have been celebrities. Before then, of course, we used to speculate about the intimate (and sometimes scandalous) carryings-on of our neighbors. But newspaper gossip columns replaced the back fence gossip network many years ago. With radio, TV, and the internet all on the bandwagon, it is celebrity shenanigans that we watch with relish, instead of the neighbors.
Recently one of those supermarket tabloids splashed a certain salsa-belting wunderkind's name and face on its cover with the question, "His he gay?" in 96-point type. I thought it was funny at first because all of the gay news outlets had been talking about him for months, even before the rest of America discovered him after a rather hot performance at the Grammies. Even Salon magazine had already broken that particular bit of "news" before the tabloid reporters woke up enough to notice.
But the real humor isn't that they're speculating, or that he isn't saying. No, what's amusing is what this game says about our culture and its attitudes. While we like to point at those tabloids or at trash-TV shows and blame them for the "coarsening" of our culture, the truth is that neither the tabloids or the trashy-chat shows would exist if there were not a LOT of people willing to buy the garbage. Not just willing, but quite enthusiastic. Oh, they may hide the trashy magazine or tabloid each week under the celery on the shopping cart, but they're buying them in large quantities.
Gay rumors have circulated around just about every handsome male who has come into the celebrity spotlight in the last couple of decades. And there isn't a simple explanation for it. Some people assume that if a man shows certain qualities that aren't considered macho enough -- if he seems to enjoy dancing a little too much, if he seems compassionate, or shows good taste in clothes or hair -- his orientation is suspect.
Other people take a complete different tack. If he exhibits too many masculine qualities, it might be over compensation.
Yet others are gay or bi themselves, and are subconsciously playing out the, "is he part of our tribe?" game. It's easy to dismiss the gushing of a gay person directed toward a teen hearth-throb as just wishful thinking, but I think there's more to it than that. Those of us who are gay, bi, or lesbian spend our formative years feeling like an outcast, a changeling, or a square peg. We feel that we don't fit in, but we aren't sure why. Since humans seem to be programmed to find common bonds with their fellow humans, we find ourselves searching each new person we meet, wondering if, maybe, this one will be like us. Maybe this one will understand us. Maybe through this friendship we will finally figure out who we are and what life is all about, anyway.
And, in the modern media world, faces on magazines and voices on the TV are just as real as the people we bump into at the supermarket. Maybe more so. So we scrutinize them. We speculate.
Sometimes we're right. I can't count the number of times during the late 80s that I heard someone say, "Oh, why doesn't George Michael just come out and get it over with? All those teen girls will keep buying his records anyway. Heck! It may help his record sales, because those girls may fantasize about how they could turn him straight!"
But we aren't always. But then, those neighborhood gossips who used to meet at the back fence and talk about the neighbors weren't either.
I don't know if the hip-swiveling teen heart-throb currently riding a wave of success in the American pop scene is gay or not. But I do know that I'm not likely to learn the truth from the internet, trash-TV, a supermarket tabloid, or even Time magazine.
Because only his hairdresser knows for sure.
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This page is copyright 1999 by Gene Breshears. Photograph is copyright 1998 by Julie Rampke. All Rights Reserved.