How the Homosexuals Saved Civilization - Cathy Crimmins [3]
And now, in our new century, straight America is embracing gayness in a dizzy, lovestruck way. The summer of 2003 will always be remembered as the moment when straight America came out of its closet and finally extended a Statue-of-Liberty welcome to gay immigrants. The Fab Five on Queer Eye for the Straight Guy thrilled us with their makeovers while reality TV extended its sexuality to include Boy Meets Boy. Pundits everywhere made up lists of what was gay and what was not. Is this just a phase? Worse, is it just a kind of pandering condescension? Are gay guys the newest pop-culture flavor? Is America just overcompensating for its rampant homophobia by adopting gay mascots in the movies and on television? Do straight folks yearn to wear “gay-face” the way guilty racists wanted to don blackface at the beginning of the last century?
No, I believe that the “gay thing” is here to stay. What we’re seeing now is just the tip of the cultural iceberg. They’re here, they’re queer, and straight America is getting used to it. Hell, we’re even appreciating it.
“Mom, am I a hag-fag?” said my daughter when she was nine years old.
“That’s fag-hag!” I snapped back. Gee, I thought, I hate that word, and now I’m teaching it to her in its correct form.
I used to resist being typed as a fag-hag. I originally intended to write a long, angry section about how this is not a book by a fag-hag. I love gay men, unabashedly. But the label “fag-hag” has always stung. Fag-hags are supposed to be women who can’t get a straight man of their own, who hang around gay guys on whom they have crushes. The fag-hag is the absolute bottom in a very complex emotional relationship. She lives vicariously through the achievements of her “fag.” The fag-hag is a major symbol of unrequited love and failed femininity.
Yet I can’t help being in awe of gay men and their cultural accomplishments. I want to celebrate them and bring them to America’s attention. So I’ve decided that I don’t care if I come across as the biggest fag-hag in the land. And if the word “queer” can be redeemed and given dignity, then why not “fag-hag”?
Fag-hag. Yes, I am one. Fag-hag, c’est moi. “Fag-hag” will one day be a friendly label, and I do think it is due for rehabilitation. The comedian Margaret Cho has already begun its repositioning. “I am fortunate enough to have been a fag-hag for most of my life,” she writes in her book, I’m the One That I Want.
The term “stag-hag” to describe a heterosexual male who is friendly to gays has already emerged, so can the elevation of fag-hag be far behind? (And I’m waiting for “hag” to pass into the suffix category, as “queen” has. If we can have a drama queen, how about a “flag-hag” for a righteous right-winger, or “mag-hag” for someone who’s overly into Us or Vogue?)
How the Homosexuals Saved Civilization is not specifically about chronological gay history—there are many tomes that cover that. I don’t have any interest in identifying who was homosexual and who was not throughout recorded time. There will be no revelatory “Hitler was a fag” or “Lincoln was gay” moments here.
In discussing gay men’s influence on straight culture, I’ve focused mostly on post-Stonewall culture (meaning the period after 1969, after the Stonewall riots in Greenwich Village, the event that most historians cite as the beginning of the gay rights movement), although some of my examples go as far back as the 1930s.
Unfortunately, for the most part I’ve excluded lesbian culture: However hard their struggle, lesbians have tended to be more domestic, making less of an impact on cutting-edge trends in our culture than gay men have. This, too, will probably change.
I’ve tried hard not to succumb to the Bermuda Triangle of Queer Theory, the academic discipline that views all culture through the lens of