Contrarian: Leave the Leather Bike Shorts at Home

When I was growing up, it was inconceivable for an openly gay person to appear on television or in movies. (Elton John was married, for God’s sake.) I recall one memorable meatloaf dinner at my home in Northeast Philly at which my oldest brother joked to my dad that Jim Nabors, the singer and TV’s Gomer Pyle, was gay. My father went off, so angry at such blasphemy that we spent the rest of the meal in silence. Things weren’t much better by the ’80s, when ABC was boycotted after the Philly-set drama thirtysomething showed two gay men in bed together.

Mercifully, times change. Today, gay characters on TV (Brothers & Sisters, Ugly Betty, Desperate Housewives) are common; until recently, suburban moms tuned in daily to hear Rosie O’Donnell blather on about what her “wife” and kids did the prior weekend. In 2003, Philly launched a marketing campaign with the slogan “Get your history straight and your nightlife gay”; in November, an “out” lesbian won a seat on the Kennett Square borough council — and nobody cared. My brother Jack and his wife went house-hunting recently, finally buying a place in Collegeville in no small measure because it was being sold by a gay guy. “Nobody keeps up their properties better,” my brother said without a shred of irony. Before their most recent Christmas party, my parents’ friends Joanne and ­Dennis — he’s a Catholic deacon — made sure to tell me I could bring a date “if there’s anyone special in your life.”

That’s progress, and it’s worth noting. African-Americans don’t have sit-ins at lunch counters anymore because they don’t have to — they won that battle, and their tactics changed as they prepared for the even bigger ones ahead. Would Barack Obama be a viable candidate for president today if they hadn’t? There’s a lesson in there for us, and it’s not found in a box of Nice ’n Easy.

I CAN ALREADY hear the screeching and howling about my deep self-loathing, my internal homophobia. Save your breath. Such remonstrations miss the point. I’ll happily defend the rights of any man who wants to pile on the pancake, or those who seek to surgically switch sides in the battle of the sexes. But I, too, have rights, and they include not being defined by being lumped in with every fringe character who feels like an outsider. Frankly, I have nothing more in common with someone who wants to switch his gender than with someone who embraces Rush Limbaugh’s politics. But I’m admonished as a traitor if I don’t embrace the would-be changees as part of my LGBT “community.” Uh, why?

It’s ironic to me that the struggle for gay rights in this country has been the struggle not to be marginalized, not to be relegated to the sidelines and dismissed as some sort of aberration that threatens to blow up the nuclear American family. And yet at every gay pride festival and parade, we do just that, balkanizing ourselves into neat little compartments — the transvestites, the bears, the twinks, the daddies — and giving a fresh new round of ammo to the small-minded people who need little encouragement to use it against us.

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