Be Good

As I have lately been making occasional mention of My Boyfriend Johnny Weir©, I feel I ought to say what it is that I find admirable about him as a spokescreature for The Queers. Firstly, as a humbuggering reactionary, I enjoy anyone who so resolutely confounds the categorizers. Johnny Weir makes no secret of being a big queer, but he keeps refusing to say that he's gay--a distinction, I think, with an important difference. I do not suppose anyone thinks Johnny is secretly banging some girlfriend while riding our current popular obsession with queeny popstar types. He has--almost--admitted as much; he likes dick. Well, that's cool. But in both public persona and topical statements, he proposes himself not as a representative or role model of homosexuals as much as a representative of all the poor kids, girls and boys, butch and femme, who do not comport to the received norms of gender. And that, I think, is altogether more brazen, braver, and more important.

I've observed before that much of the animus directed toward people of minority sexualities is motivated less by discomfort with sexuality per se than it is grounded in fear and hatred for those who are perceived as transgressing on the prescribed borders of male and female. I do not deny that same-sex sex, especially the dude-on-dude variety, still elicits prejudicial ICKs! from our society, but let's be frank. Ever since that first sleepless night in childhood when, having ventured into the hall on the way to a glass of water, we overheard the quiet creek of Mom-and-Dad's conjugal bed, we have been adepts and experts at pretending that we do not hear each other doin' it. I am sure that the nice straight couple next door pretends that no sex occurs in our household just as surely as we pretend that none occurs in theirs. I do do a lot of yoga. That explains the grunts, right?

Like any gay teenager, I experienced a fair share of derision and mockery, and yet it was always relatively benign. In part, this was because I was a child of great privilege. My family was very important in our small community. My father was a major public figure. My mother was on all the important committees and boards. My teachers and school administrators looked out for me because of who my parents were. But in even greater part, I never really traduced the norms of adolescent boydom. If hardly an ass-slapping heterosexual jock type (which in retrospect seems the queerest of queer, don't it?), I was reasonably athletic, understood how engines worked, got by just fine in wood shop, knew how to fish, followed the Pens and the Steelers, drank plenty of lousy beer, enjoyed loud action and science fiction movies, and was far, far less fastidious about personal appearance than I have become in my faggy older age--and even that, at last, has only to do with the fact that, vocationally, I am a sell-out, a careerist, a climber.

In comparison, one boy named Brent, likewise an honors and AP student, contrariwise a clumsy whippet of a twink with a taste for argyle sweaters, was teased mercilessly, constantly called a fag, forever harangued in gym, and generally made totally miserable because, at the root of it, he was girlish. He was also straight--is straight. Liked girls. Had not the slightest interest in dick. I should know, because I assumed, just as crassly as the bullies, the he must be gay, and tried fruitlessly to get him in bed.

Which brings us back to Johnny. Here is a queer public figure who is not endlessly agitating for the right to ape heterosexist contractual unions, who proposes not that it is fine for men to sleep with men, but that it is fine for men to act like women, or for women to act like men, or--since we love to follow things through to their logical conclusions here at Who Is IOZ?--that there is really no such thing as acting like a woman or acting like a man, except insofar as it's all just acting. I find it wholly admirable and entirely refreshing, after the last decade of dull-dull-dull marriage lawsuits and the current ongoing fervor to ensure that the gays can kill for their country.