OPINION

The new Smurfs
In the world of ‘Will & Grace’ and post-Lawrence v. Texas, we are as cute and cuddly as Jerry Falwell’s Tinky Winky. But let’s not confuse our image with the reality of our lives.

STEVE WEINSTEIN
Friday, July 18, 2003

A FUNNY THING happened after the landmark Lawrence v. Texas decision by the Supreme Court, which sweepingly threw out all sodomy laws and suddenly made private homosex a legally sanctioned leisure-time activity. According to news producers and commentators, not one member of the Bush administration would publicly come out against the ruling.

Instead, the all-news channels and newspaper reporters were reduced to rounding up the usual suspects from the fringe right. You know, groups, like Family Research Council and Focus on the Family. Sometimes I think they only exist to offer sound bites. Other times I’m sure of it.

Yes, Senate GOP leader Bill Frist (Tenn.) went on record as saying he’s opposed to gay marriage. But most observers agree that a “Defense of Marriage” constitutional amendment would be difficult to pass (not that we can let our guard down). So people like Frist consider this a safe issue, since they don’t see the reality of such an amendment.

At last month’s New York Pride parade, there was also a sea change. I can still remember in past years, horrified tourists running away, while mothers shielded their children’s eyes from drag queens in thongs, leather men in chaps and dykes on bikes.

This year, tourists were scrambling to take pictures and shake those drag queens’ hands, to snap a photo for the folks back home of the leatherman’s behind and to cheer those bike-riding dykes. Rather than fleeing the mayhem, families were setting up lawn chairs and hoisting their kids on Dad’s shoulders for a better view of the pretty boys on their pretty floats.

CALL IT THE “Will and Grace”

factor: Forget Sharon Stone’s “Basic Instinct” femme fatale, S&M slasher in “Cruising”; and the gender-variant serial murderer in “The Silence of the Lambs.” Today, we’re Eric McCormack, who plays Will with as much flamboyance as John Wayne; or we’re cute and cuddly sissies like Sean Hayes’ Jack.

We’ve become the new Smurfs. Jerry Falwell was right. We really are Tinky Winky!

Other cultural trends have also contributed to this transformation. RuPaul made mile-high black drag queens safe for Middle America. Ellen DeGeneres has become the only major stand-up comedian whose repertoire of four-letter words consists of “jeez,” “gosh” and “darn.”

Matthew Shepard’s boyish face came to symbolize young lives cut short through hatred and intolerance. Nathan Lane and Elton John are cute, cuddly and talented: Paul Lynde without the snide curled lip.

To be sure, plenty of people still hate us. But in many circles, it’s become uncool to express it. In the most recent issue of Esquire, in an article entitled “10 Things You Don’t Know about Women,” Lauren Weisberger writes, “Nothing you were thinking about saying about the gay couple you saw in the supermarket is a good idea. Trust me.”

In other words, don’t even try to be cute or snide about us, pal, or you’ll be sleeping on the sofa tonight.

This acceptance has gotten so trendy that it was cleverly satirized in the film “American Beauty.” In that hymn to suburban dysfunction, the blandest, most boring people — the only happy couple in the film — were the two gorgeous, successful gay professionals.

DON’T GET ME wrong: There’s still plenty of what commentators have taken to calling “the ick factor” out there. The ick factor translates as people believing — either because they’re true conservatives (that is, government non-interference in private matters), Libertarians, liberals or just people of good will — that the government has no place in our bedroom. But they also don’t want to have to think about what we actually do there.

Hence the “ick”: Gay men may have the right to have sex, but that doesn’t mean that anybody wants to think about what that actually means, at least graphically. (I specify “gay men” because let’s face it: Straight people either have a fascination with lesbian sex; are titillated or downright turned on by it; or, like Queen Victoria, simply consider it a physical impossibility.)

To counter the ick factor, many of our spokespersons have taken the “virtually normal” route. They talk of us as the family next door, the couple down the hall, your sons and daughters and nieces and uncles and teachers and firemen and …

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I’m getting a little tired of being so damned nice. God bless Lambda Legal for its wonderful work arguing Lawrence all the way to the Supreme Court. But why did their lawyers have to keep saying that the decision legitimized sex between two men or two women?

First of all, Lawrence was a decisive victory for heterosexuals. This little fact has been overlooked in all of the rejoicing or hand-wringing. But the court went much further than simply saying that Texas was wrong in singling out gay men for “sodomy”; the five justices ruled that laws against any form of sodomy between consenting adults was invalid.

Believe it or not, until June 26, if Dad wanted to do some sheet diving and pleasure Mom while Junior is safely reading the latest “Harry Potter” down the hall, he would have been committing a crime in Alabama, Florida, Idaho, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Utah or Virginia. Ditto if Mom wanted to bite the banana.

“So what?” you say. “There’s no way the police would find them.” That’s what John Geddes Lawrence and Tyron Garner thought when police mistakenly burst into their apartment and found them in bed together. Such laws demean everyone, including happily married monogamous couples. (New York State has just stricken from its legal books the word “sodomy,” which has as much relevance to modern jurisprudence as “fornicator” or “witchcraft.”)

But I also object to that “boy (or girl) next door” stuff. What Lawrence did was to say that private, consensual sex is not the government’s business. That means that if someone wants to go online and invite over four of his nearest and dearest (whose last names he’ll never know) for a messy night of sex, that’s no one’s business but his own.

I wish someone from Lambda Legal had told that to Bill O’Reilly.

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